Alignment of Business Enterprise Architectures using fact-based ontologies

doi:10.1016/j.eswa.2009.09.052

Expert Systems with Applications

Volume 37, Issue 4, April 2010, Pages 3274-3283

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eswa.2009.09.052 Get rights and content

Abstract

Strategy is the key factor for success of enterprises. In order to survive competitive business environment, enterprises have to build strategies which are appropriate to the business environment. But, just only to build business strategies is worthless. Proper business processes should be executed for the business strategies flexibly, and proper enterprise resources should support the business processes systematically. In addition, members of enterprises should recognize relationships among business strategies, business processes and enterprise resources explicitly. To fulfill the requirements, strategy alignment based on the Business Enterprise Architecture is suggested in this paper. The Business Enterprise Architecture is composed of Business Architecture and resource architectures which are loosely-coupled to each other. Detailed architecture modeling is conducted with an enterprise meta-model in the form of fact-based ontologies. Enterprise models are verbalized in the form of facts based on the meta-model. Strategy alignments are visualized through matrix-shaped alignment tables under the Business Enterprise Architecture.

Introduction

A strategy is the key factor for success of enterprises. In order to survive competitive business environment, enterprises have to build the strategies which are appropriate to the business environment. So far, there have been many researches on building strategies, and various research results have been published. Only building strategies, however, is not sufficient for enterprises to succeed in winning at markets. No matter how excellent strategies are formulated, if enterprise processes are not executed according to the strategies, if enterprise resources do not support the enterprise processes based on the strategies, and if enterprise members do not grasp which strategies they contribute to, the strategies cannot but fail.

In order for established strategies to be propagated into a whole enterprise and executed consistently, the enterprise must keep following requirements.

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Alignment between super strategies and sub strategies should be achieved.
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Alignment between strategies and business processes should be achieved.
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Alignment between strategies and performance metrics should be achieved.
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Alignment between performance metrics and business processes should be achieved.
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Alignment between business processes and supportive resources should be achieved.
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The alignments should be recognized by enterprise members.

When enterprises fulfill all the requirements, the enterprises can accomplish the alignments among business strategies, business processes, and enterprise resources. In this condition, enterprise members can grasp explicitly which strategies they contribute to, enterprise processes can be executed and evaluated according to the strategies, and enterprise resources (IT resources, Human resources, etc.) can support the enterprise processes strategically. The existing researches, however, focus some of the requirements and pass over others.

In order to fulfill all the requirements so that enterprises can align strategies, processes and resources with each other, tools that support the alignments is needed. In this paper, an Enterprise Architecture (EA) is suggested as a tool. The Enterprise Architecture refers to a comprehensive description of all of the key elements and relationships that make up an organization (Harmon, 2003). In other words, it is thought of the enterprise blueprint which systematizes constituent units of an enterprise, such as business processes, organizations, data, information technologies, and so on. Brown (2004) asserts six values of the EA, and the two values among them support the approach. The first value of the EA is the ability to unify and integrate the business processes across the enterprise and the second value is the ability to create and maintain a common vision of the future shared by both the business and IT communities, driving continuous business/IT alignment (Brown, 2004). These values of the EA enable enterprises to define strategies, processes and resources well, and align them with each other systematically through the EA.

In this paper, the methodology for the strategy alignment based on the Business Enterprise Architecture is suggested. The Business Enterprise Architecture is the EA to manage strategies, processes, and resources systematically, and to maintain relationships among them. It focuses on business factors, such as business strategies and business processes while traditional EAs focuses on IT. Elements in the Business Enterprise Architecture and alignments among them are defined with an enterprise meta-model. According to the meta-model, enterprise models which describes a blue print of an enterprise can be defined. Enterprise elements have various relationships with each other. These relationships have their own semantics. But, the enterprise model cannot express the semantics enough. In order to define semantics of the relationships, the fact-based ontologies are defined. Through the fact-based ontologies, the relationships can be defined and reasoned semantically. The fact-based ontologies, however, are not compact so that people cannot recognize the wanted relationships at a glance. In order for people to grasp the related relationships at a glance, the visualization method based on a matrix-shaped alignment table is suggested.

This paper is organized as follows: Section 2 provides related works. In Section 3, the Business Enterprise Architecture is introduced, and fact-based ontologies are defined in Section 4. How to visualize strategy alignments under the EA is discussed in Section 5, and system for strategy alignment is described in Section 6. Finally conclusions and future works are discussed in Section 7.

Section snippets

Related works

Researches on strategy alignments are classified into researches on business strategy alignments and researches on IT strategy alignments. The researches on business strategy alignments deal with alignments between enterprise-wide strategies and operation-level strategies and alignments between detailed strategies and business processes. The researches on IT strategy alignments treat of alignments between business strategies and IT strategies, alignments between IT strategies and processes, and

Enterprise architecture for strategy alignment

In order to cope with radically changing business environment, enterprises need to work out corresponding strategies. In addition, to execute strategies, flexible processes are essential, and, to support flexible processes, well-organized resources are required. Using an Enterprise Architecture (EA), enterprises can manage strategies, flexible processes, and supportive resources systematically and can maintain their relations such as relations between business strategies and execution

Fact-based enterprise ontologies

Enterprise elements have various relationships with each other. These relationships have their own semantics. But, the enterprise model cannot express the semantics enough. For example, as shown in Fig. 3, the business strategy S2 is a sub strategy of the business strategy S1. And, the business process P3 is executed to achieve the business strategy S2. As shown in the enterprise model, relationship between the business strategy S1 and the business process P3 is not defined. It looks that the

Visualization of strategy alignments

In Sections 3 and 4, the Business Enterprise Architecture and fact-based ontologies for the Business Enterprise Architecture are suggested. Through the fact-based ontologies, the relationships can be defined and reasoned semantically. The fact-based ontologies, however, are not compact so that people cannot recognize the wanted relationships at a glance. In the work place, it is important for workers to recognize the related relationships at a glance while the fact-based ontologies define all

System for strategy alignment under the EA

Fig. 13 shows the system for strategy alignment in the conceptual level. Using the EA meta-model Manager, enterprise meta-models are defined, managed and modified. The meta-model can be modeled with fact-based ontologies. The defined meta-model is stored in the EA meta-model repository. Using the EA model Manager, fact-based ontologies for enterprise models are defined, managed and modified. Through the EA meta-model from the EA meta-model Manager, the facts for enterprise model can be parsed

Conclusions

In order for enterprises to cope with a radically changing business environment, enterprises need to build excellent business strategies. But, just only to build business strategies is worthless. Proper business processes should execute the business strategies flexibly, and proper enterprise resources should support the business processes systematically. In addition, members of enterprises should recognize the relationships among business strategies, business processes and enterprise resources

Acknowledgements

This work is supported by Grant No. R01-2007-000-11040-0 from the Basic Research Program of the Korea Science and Engineering Foundation.

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