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Working Groups are one of the core activities of ITANA.  As such, they play a large roll in fulfilling our capabilities.   A capability scan is a good way to start out your group.  It helps you define your scope and deliverables in a common way across groups.   It also ensures that your work is aligned with the goals a mission of ITANA.   This short article walks you through a quick capability scan.  This shouldn’t take more than one or two meetings of your team to complete.  The outcome of the scan is a great way to communicate your team’s goals and deliverables back with ITANA.

Strategic Capability Scan

When you start up your group, have a look at ITANA’s Capability Map( - http://itana.org/capability-map/).  Think about how this group helps support the strategic capabilities.  Below are some guiding questions and examples.^{Image Added}

Practice Development

• What areas of the EA practice does this group cover?
• Are lessons about how to advance the practice that should be highlighted?
• Are their maturity models or maturity lessons to share?

Knowledge Transfer

• What are the key lessons or takeaways that you want other architects get from your work?
• What is the best way to achieve those takeaways?
• What channels are best suited to your message?

Community Building

• Does this group lead to a natural peer-group within ITANA?
• Does it have a role in bringing members together in new ways?
• If so, how will you gather these peers together?

Outreach

• Does this work have a broader audience than just itself and/or ITANA?
• If so, how will you get the message out to broader audiences in higher education?
• Can this group play a role in educating people about ITANA?

These Strategic Capabilities are critical to ITANA and to your group’s success.  Focusing on how your group will deliver these outcomes is a good foundational activity for your team.  

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The Service Capabilities are the things we do to deliver the strategic capabilities.  Your group will need to deliver a collaboration service, a content creation service, an instructional service and networking service.  You should ask questions about how you will build and deliver these services for your group.    Questions you might ask are:

• How will you structure your collaboration,
• Who should be involved and how will you engage them,
• How will you manage content,
• What are the various tools, social media sites and spaces that you will use for your content,
• What kind of instructional materials will come from your effort,
• What is the best format and channels for any instructional materials, and
• How could this effort be used to connect peers with each other or form communities of practice?

The Community-Facing Capabilities

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