Modeling resources and capabilities in enterprise architecture: A well-founded ontology-based proposal for ArchiMate

The importance of capabilities and resources for portfolio management and business strategy has been recognized in the management literature. Despite that, little attention has been given to integrate the notions of capabilities and resources in enterprise architecture descriptions. One notable exception is a recent proposal to extend the ArchiMate framework and language to include capability and resources and thus improve ArchiMate’s coverage of portfolio management. This paper presents an ontological analysis of the concepts introduced in that proposal, focusing in particular on the resource, capability and competence concepts. We provide an account for these concepts in terms of the Unified Foundational Ontology (UFO). The analysis allows us to identify semantic issues in the proposal and suggest well-founded recommendations for improvements. We revise the proposed metamodel in order to address the identified problems, thereby improving the semantic clarity and usefulness of the proposed language extension. Two real-world cases are modeled with the resulting metamodel to show the applicability of the constructs and relations in an industrial setting.