PhD Defence Rodrigo Calhau | Ontological Foundations for Capability and Competence Modeling in Enterprise Architecture

Ontological Foundations for Capability and Competence Modeling in Enterprise Architecture

Rodrigo Calhau is a PhD student in the department Semantics, Cybersecurity & Services. (Co)Promotors are prof.dr. G. Guizzardi from the faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Sciences (EEMCS), University of Twente and prof.dr. J. Almeida from the Federal University of Espirito Santo.

Understanding how organizations adapt and innovate requires explaining how their capabilities emerge from the interaction of social and technical components. While Systems Science, Systems Engineering, and Enterprise Architecture have long addressed organizational structures and capabilities, they offer limited guidance on how to model capability emergence in a systematic and well-founded way.

This book presents an ontological foundation for modeling capabilities and their emergence in sociotechnical systems. Grounded in General System Theory and disposition-based theories, the proposed foundation integrates human and technical capabilities, with particular attention to competences, skills and other human aspects. The approach is underpinned by three interrelated ontologies—of dispositions, capabilities, and competences—rooted in the Unified Foundational Ontology (UFO).

Adopting a systemist perspective inspired by Bunge’s model of systems, the book explains capability emergence in terms of components, structure, behavior, functions, and interactions. The approach is evaluated through a real-world case study on Spotify’s Agile Coaching capability and an empirical study with academics and practitioners, demonstrating its applicability and perceived usefulness in organizational and architectural contexts.