These activities support the successful development and monitoring of the capabilities¹ that underpin an organisation's ability to conduct its business. They aim principally at promoting the re-use and sharing of infrastructure (statistical and technical), both inside the organisation and across organisations, thus facilitating harmonisation and coherence of statistical outputs.

This activity area is broken down into 4 sub-activities. The sub-activities are:

• Plan capability improvements
• Develop capability improvements
• Monitor capabilities
• Support capability implementation

Plan capability improvements

These activities aim at planning the best way forward to improve an organisation's capabilities. They require a thorough organisational view of change requirements, the prioritisation of options through an efficient, iterative approval process until a work programme for capability improvements is finalised. These activities further coordinate the planning and resourcing of cross-cutting / reusable capability improvement projects (both large and small), to ensure key improvement work is integrated across the organisation, with interdependencies understood and the resources optimized across the work programme. These activities also monitor the ongoing progress of the work programme and report to the relevant governance fora to ensure all required change requests occur in an efficient and effective manner. These include:

• Identify disruptions and capability improvements
• Propose capability improvement projects
• Manage capability improvement programmes

Develop capability improvements

These activities develop approved improvement projects from the requirements stage through to their completion. The developers will undertake research, define the detailed requirements, coordinate the design and building, and finalize all aspects of the capabilities being developed, including their deployment for operational use. The activities mainly concern the development of capability improvements for multiple statistical business processes, including cases where capability improvements are developed through partnering with other statistical organisation or through implementing reusable infrastructure originally developed by others. Capability improvements in the context of a single statistical business process are included in the Production activity area. The activities include:

• Undertake background research
• Develop detailed capability requirements
• Design capability solution
• Build and release capability solution
• Manage capability development project

Monitor capabilities

These activities aim at monitoring the organisation capabilities, ensuring the organisation reaps maximum benefits from investments. They involve maintaining capabilities, evaluating them or suggesting where improvements are required. Staff members undertaking these activities effectively become the custodians / reference persons for the capabilities, taking responsibility for their fitness for purpose. These include:

• Maintain capabilities
• Promote capabilities
• Evaluate capabilities

Support capability implementation

These activities provide the technical hands-on assistance required across the organisation to ensure that the capabilities are actually used in support of the development and implementation of statistical production. These activities also guide the successful operation of individual reusable business processes. When a capability is fully integrated in Production, its support is transferred to Corporate Support. These include:

• Support design
• Support operations
• Support use externally

1. The Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF) defines a capability as ""An ability that an organisation, person, or system possesses. Capabilities are typically expressed in general and high-level terms and typically require a combination of organisation, people, processes, and technology to achieve."