From Business Strategy to Enterprise Architecture and Back

The environment of organizations is changing more rapidly in recent years, which makes it increasingly more difficult to stay competitive. Organizations need to ensure that when they make transformations, they focus on maintaining and improving their strategic alignment. Strategic alignment is a process of continuous change which focuses on creating a synergy between the position of the organization within the competitive environment and the design of the appropriate structure to support its execution. However, while many developments have been made over the past few decades, there are still some areas which could benefit from further research. One such example is relating high-level strategic information and plans to the detailed enterprise architecture (EA) of an organization. Therefore, in this paper, we choose to explore how several of the most popular strategy techniques can be modeled with the help of concepts from the EA modeling language ArchiMate, in the context of the strategy process. Additionally, we introduce the software tool which was developed to support the modeling of these strategy techniques with the EA modeling language ArchiMate.