You can observe every component of an enterprise and still not understand the health of the enterprise. SRE practice tells us to set objectives around what users care about, but those objectives rarely connect to a governed account of what the enterprise actually does. The missing object isn’t another metric, dashboard or SLO. It’s the business capability: the enduring definition of what the enterprise must be able to do, independent of the systems that deliver it. This talk sets out how a capability-based topology, running from business capability through applications and data to infrastructure, can become the organizing foundation for service health, semantic analysis and AI-driven diagnostics. It compares three approaches: adding capabilities to existing observability tools, making the capability model the organizing structure for service health, and using AI agents to engineer observability against topologies that change constantly. The argument throughout is that capabilities are the layer worth designing for, because they remain stable as the technology beneath them changes.
Raymond Carlson is the founder and principal of Carlson BCM, a business capability architecture practice for insurance and financial services. Over three decades he has led design authority on enterprise transformations across insurance, banking and capital markets, connecting strategy, operations and technology to a single governed model of what the enterprise must be able to do. His recent work applies that model to observability and service health, anchoring enterprise topology, operational data and AI-driven diagnostics to the business capabilities they support. He is the author of the Carlson BCM framework and publishes the weekly newsletter Carlson BCM Insights.
