Capabilities as a graph — the Universal Capability Exchange
The Universal Capability Exchange (UCX) is the shared vocabulary for what an organisation can do, what that rests on, and what is missing. This page explains how to read it. No account needed.
Capabilities as a graph
Nodes are capabilities. Lines are dependencies. Status says what is holding things up — and one missing capability usually explains several stuck ones.
Grouped by layer, top to bottom. Each layer builds on the one above it.
Foundations
- Identity & directory Active
- IT infrastructure Active
- Retail branches Not relevant
The gap
- Backup & recovery Can activate blocks 3 Depends on: IT infrastructure (Required)Depends on: Identity & directory (Optional) Alternative: Managed backup (provider)
- Managed backup (provider) Locked Alternative: Backup & recovery
Waiting on it
- Incident management Blocked Depends on: Backup & recovery (Required)
- Disaster recovery Blocked Depends on: Backup & recovery (Required)
The question
- Business continuity Blocked Depends on: Incident management (Required)Depends on: Disaster recovery (Required)
Status
- Active
- Can activate
- Blocked
- Locked
- Not relevant
Lines
- Required
- Optional
- Alternative
The path a capability takes
- Gap The graph shows which capability is missing — and how many others are waiting on it.
- Ownership Someone takes it on. That becomes a quest with a name and a date against it.
- Setup A pattern from the library, or an offer from the market, establishes it.
- Run evidence Running it produces evidence. Without evidence the status stays a claim.
- Activation & reuse The capability goes active — and becomes a building block others can depend on.
Nodes are capabilities, not software
A node is something an organisation can do — keep its books, recover from an outage, issue an identity. It is deliberately neither a product nor a department: two organisations can hold the same capability with entirely different tools and entirely different people. That is what makes the graph comparable across organisations, and what lets one organisation's solution show up as an option in another's gap.
Lines are dependencies, and they have kinds
A required line means the capability cannot work without the one it comes from. An optional line makes it better, not possible. An alternative line marks two capabilities that solve the same problem, so choosing one settles the other. Keeping the three apart is what turns a picture into an answer: only required lines carry a blockage forward, so only they explain why something is stuck.
Status, and why colour is never the only signal
Five statuses are shown publicly: active, can activate, blocked, locked, not relevant. Each carries its own shape and its own written label, because colour alone cannot do this job — WCAG contrast runs from 1 to 21, so at most three colours can be told apart from one another at the 3:1 threshold, and only two once the background is counted. Here colour reinforces the shape and the label; it never replaces them.
What this page is not
This is an explanation, not the application. The graph above is a fixed example rather than live data: it cannot be panned, filtered or edited. The working graph lives inside a workspace, bound to that organisation's own capabilities, evidence and permissions.
What is listed there depends on the instance — on a fresh installation the list can be empty.