Towards capturing strategic planning in EA

Strategic planning aims at improving both the financial and behavioral performance of an enterprise. It concerns the enterprise and its desired future, helping set priorities, concentrate capabilities and resources on key operations, ensure that stakeholders are working toward common goals and assess and adjust the enterprise’s direction. Although it motivates and drives Enterprise Architecture (EA) choices, strategic planning is currently not explicitly reflected in EA models. This paper addresses this gap by presenting a principled approach to support strategic planning modeling in EA. We first analyze the strategic planning literature, developing a conceptual model for strategic planning that is aligned with a foundational ontology. We then propose a language metamodel that incorporates the conceptual model into the ArchiMate modeling language. In order to show the usefulness of our approach, we use our proposed language constructs to model the strategic plan of a medium-to-large pension fund