Alignment of Business Enterprise Architectures Using Fact-Based Ontologies

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. © 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.