Capability Engineering

Capability Engineering Perspectives

The term capability is widely used across many industrial sectors and has begun to take on various specific meanings across, and even within, those sectors. Terms such as capability-based acquisition, capability engineering and management, Through Life Capability Management, capability sponsor, etc. are now ubiquitous in defense and elsewhere. Henshaw et. al. (2011) have identified at least eight worldviews of capability and capability engineering and concluded that the task of capability engineering is not consistently defined across different communities. Nevertheless, there are some common statements that one can make about capability engineering and its relationship to systems engineering .

Capability is the ability to do something; it is not a synonym for a system function or system purpose. A corollary of the statement above is that capability engineering is significantly different from product systems engineering and broader than (though it incorporates) the process perspective of systems engineering.

Capability engineering is very similar in scope to views of systems engineering such as Ring’s Value Cycle (Ring 2002) and layers 1-4 of Hitchins’ Five Layer Model (Hitchins 1994). Indeed, Capability engineering is the overarching approach that links value , purpose, and solution of a systems problem. As such, capability engineering comprises mindset (holistic thinking, assumptions), trade-offs, design , processes, values and policy, and outcomes. The processes for capability engineering are similar to traditional systems engineering, but the mindset and system boundary are different.

Capability is realised through a combination of components that include hard (equipment) and soft (people and processes) systems together with supporting services and infrastructure.

The relationship of capability to system of systems (sos) can be colloquially summarised as Capability is an emergent property of system of systems.

Services view of SoSE

As has been discussed throughout the Systems of Systems (SoS) knowledge area, ‘system of systems’ is typically viewed from the viewpoint of bringing together multiple systems to provide broader capability. As is discussed in Architecting Approaches for Systems of Systems, the networking of the constituent systems in a SoS is often a key part of an SoS. In some circumstances, the entire content of an SoS is information and the SoS brings together multiple information systems to support the information needs of a broader community. These ‘information technology (IT) based’ SoSs have the same set of characteristics of other SoSs and face many of the same challenges. Current IT has adopted a ‘services’ view of this type of SoS, and increasingly apply a ‘service oriented architecture ’ approach to design and management (Erl 2008). This approach decouples the architectural approach from the implementation, defining the functions to be provided across the SoS in terms of ‘services’. This approach allows for evolution of the underlying technical approaches in the supporting systems while maintaining continuity in supporting the needs of users across the SoS. While most commonly applied to IT based SoS, this services conceptualization of SoS can be applied to SoS of all types.

References

Works Cited

Erl, T. 2008. "SOA Principles of Service Design." Boston, MA, USA: Prentice Hall Pearson Education. ISBN 978-0-13234-482-1.

Primary References

Henshaw, M., D. Kemp, P. Lister, A. Daw, A. Harding, A. Farncombe, and M. Touchin. 2011. "Capability Engineering - An Analysis of Perspectives." Presented at International Council on Systems Engineering (INCOSE) 21st International Symposium, 20-23 June 2011. Denver, US.