Towards a unified business strategy language: A meta-model of strategy maps

Abstract

Alignment between business strategies and the resources engaged ensuring their realization, has been a continuous concern of enterprises of all kinds in last few decades. Commonly, enterprises fail to establish the traceability from business strategies towards operational tasks carried by employees. From the requirements engineering perspective this problem leads also to a misalignment between business and IT assets. In this study, we argue that for communicating high-level intentions and strategies down to the operational perspective, i.e. tasks and resources, the core necessity is to have a rich and well-defined language for modeling business strategies. Such a language could be further utilized for facilitating formalizations and a constructive analysis of high-level business aspects of enterprises, as well for comparing and unifying existing intentional modeling languages from the business and requirements engineering domains. As a reference proposal for formalizing business strategies, we consider the well-established strategy maps [1] from the Management Information Systems community which provide textual concepts of strategy-related notions establishing causal relationships between them. We have set an effort to formalize strategy maps in the form of a meta-model, usage scenarios and constraints, providing a systematic basis for obtaining a unified language/ontology for business strategy modeling. © 2010 IFIP International Federation for Information Processing.