From Business Strategy to Enterprise Architecture and Back

Abstract

The environment of organizations is changing more rapidly in recent years, which makes it increasingly more difficult to stay competitive. Organizations need to ensure that when they make transformations, they focus on maintaining and improving their strategic alignment. Strategic alignment is a process of continuous change which focuses on creating a synergy between the position of the organization within the competitive environment and the design of the appropriate structure to support its execution. However, while many developments have been made over the past few decades, there are still some areas which could benefit from further research. One such example is relating high-level strategic information and plans to the detailed enterprise architecture (EA) of an organization. Therefore, in this paper, we choose to explore how several of the most popular strategy techniques can be modeled with the help of concepts from the EA modeling language ArchiMate, in the context of the strategy process. Additionally, we introduce the software tool which was developed to support the modeling of these strategy techniques with the EA modeling language ArchiMate.

Business strategy: The influence of Strategic Competitiveness on competitive advantage

“…Organizations tended to use this strategy until leadership became an important part of the business community's internal change. According to Aldea et al (2018), organizational culture is one of the factors influencing empowerment effectiveness. In addition to evaluating the failure of certain empowerment-related studies, such as individuals' failure to engage effectively in the moral and sense empowerment scheme, another study indicated that the implementation of empowerment involves a fundamental shift in the corporate culture context .…”

Can Enterprise Architecture Be Based on the Business Strategy?

“…The four problems with the business strategy identified and presented in this paper (see Figure 1) challenge the status quo in EA research and question one of the most cherished beliefs, assumptions or even axioms of the EA discipline: that EA should be based on the business strategy. As demonstrated in this paper, these beliefs are based essentially only on the recommendations of prescriptive EA methodologies promoted by consultancies and gurus [8,9,10,11,12,21,22,23,24,25,26,27,28] and on some other EA literature which is either completely speculative, or substantiated only by anecdotal evidence [13,14,29,30,31,32,33,34,35,36,37,38,39,40,41]. At the same time, all the potential solutions to these problems outlined earlier are only tentative, somewhat speculative and none of them has been thoroughly studied and validated in the EA context.…”

“…Moreover, Gartner analysts argue that "the strategy analysis is the foundation of the EA effort" and propose six best practices to align EA with the business strategy [35, p. 1]. Unsurprisingly, similar views are also shared by academic researchers, who analyze the integration between the business strategy and EA [36], modeling of the business strategy in the EA context [37,38,39] as well as other aspects of their relationship [40,41].…”

Empirically Modeling Enterprise Architecture Using ArchiMate

“…Several studies have proposed EA modeling approaches to represent operation models [8][9][10]. In addition, many studies have focused on how to apply EA modeling to governance, such as governance enterprise architecture) (GEA) [11,12], enterprise architecture management (EAM) [13][14][15], and business governance [16][17][18][19][20]. Another research area that requires EA modeling is security analysis, and representative studies include multi-level dependencies [21], security assessment frameworks [22][23][24][25][26], and security assurance and analysis [27][28][29][30][31].…”