Aligning enterprise architecture with strategic planning

Abstract

Strategic planning improves both the financial and behavioral performance of an enterprise. It helps the enterprise set priorities, focus capabilities and resources, strengthen operations, ensure that stakeholders are working toward common goals and assess and adjust the enterprise’s direction. Strategic planning is currently not explicitly represented in EA, although it motivates enterprise architecture choices. This paper studies strategic planning approaches and discusses their potential relation with EA. The paper focuses on how EA can contribute to strategic planning, discussing requirements on EA extensions to support strategic planning and pointing to solutions. A general approach to support strategic planning using EA should mutually benefit the practices of strategic planning and EA.