Incorporating enterprise strategic plans into enterprise architecture

Abstract

In the last years, information technology (IT) executives have identified IT-business strategic alignment as a top management concern. In the information technology area, emphasis has been given to the Enterprise Architecture (EA) discipline with respect to enterprise management. The focus of the discipline has been on the operational components of the enterprise, undermining its strategic aspects. As a consequence, the incorporation of strategic level concerns and strategic plans in the EA discipline is still incipient. To incorporate strategic plans into the EA discipline, several challenges need to be addressed, from the representation of strategy in enterprise architectures to the relation between a particular strategy and the whole EA, including its operational level. An additional challenge lies in identifying a precise conceptualization for strategic management elements in EA. This thesis aims to incorporate enterprise strategic plans into the enterprise architecture discipline, thereby enabling the expression of strategic plans, as well as the expression of their relations to the operational aspects of an enterprise architecture. We hypothesize that using the notion of capabilities and resources from management theories, it is possible to incorporate enterprise strategic plans into the enterprise architecture discipline. Recent developments have identified capabilities as a plausible solution to link business and IT, to link business outcomes to IT, and to improve the business and IT alignment. In this setting, resources and capabilities serve as abstractions of enterprise architecture behavioral and structural elements, and are key to relate strategic level and operational level concerns. We have built a theoretical foundation for using capabilities and resources, from management, in the enterprise architecture discipline. We employ a comprehensive foundational ontology that incorporates concepts to deal with plans, objects, relations, roles, events and dispositions, as well as social and intentional concepts. We also explored and precisely defined a semantic foundation to express strategic plans in EA. We use these to express strategic-level concerns, including strategic plans, and to relate them to enterprise architecture. The theoretical foundation has been used to revise the ArchiMate language metamodel, extending it in order to enable the representation of concepts related to strategic plans, capabilities and resources in EA. In order to validate our proposal, we have performed four case studies.