Capability as a Service: Method and Tool Support for Context-Aware Business Services

Abstract

Modern enterprises have to respond to the challenge of changing competitive situations by being able to adapt their business models and the supporting IT systems. Service-orientation and cloud computing offer established approaches for achieving flexibility in the use of computing resources and sourcing strategies. This requires promoting systematic development and management of capabilities to key activities. To ease the adaptation of business services to changed business needs a complementary abstraction layer, namely, “Capability as a Service” (CaaS) should be considered. The primary purpose of this layer is to support the capture and representation of the factors that are decisive for flexibility in business services. The main contributions of this paper are (1) motivating the additional capability-focused abstraction layer by an industrial application case, (2) the concept of CaaS including methodical aspects and technology for delivery, and (3) an initial model of capabilities for the industrial application case from utilities sector.