Towards a Unified Business
Strategy Language:
A Meta-model of Strategy Maps
Constantinos Giannoulis
Michael Petit
Jelena Zdravkovic
Agenda
 Research scope
 Strategy maps
 The Strategy Map Meta-model
 Future work
Research Scope
 Goal modeling: linking stakeholders with artifacts
 The holy grail?: An artifact should serve the purpose
envisioned by stakeholders!
 System Development: GORE [1], BMM [2]
 IT alignment, IT Strategy
 Enterprise’s strategic alignment , Business Strategy?
Research Scope
Current efforts
 Combinations of languages
to align strategy and value
proposition to related
operational processes
 Examples: INSTAL, business
modeling with UML,
CREWS-L’Ecritoire, e3value, 3g framework, i* &
RAD, goal modeling and
value modeling ontology, i*
and strategy maps
[3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10]
Shortcomings
 Operationally focused
 Lack goal traceability
 No clear link between value
creation and system goals
 No support on different
stakeholder view integration
and evaluation
 Lack of requirement to
strategy traceability
 Method specific
Research Scope
Background
Goal modeling languages
Business Strategy [13]
 In RE [11]:
 The resource-based view
 various levels of applicability
(e.g. the RE process)
 The industrial organization
perspective
 semi-formal vs formal
 The Schumpeterian view of
competition
 In business
 business model & business
plan expressiveness (BMM)
 goal oriented enterprise
(Popova & Sharpanskykh)
[12]
Background
 Inspired by the Unified Enterprise Modeling
Language, UEML[14]:
 We aim at a core language for modeling business
strategy aligning business strategy to system
requirements
 We intend to analyze and evaluate goal-oriented
languages against a well defined ontological base
 Our ontological base: a unified business strategy
meta-model (business strategy concepts and
frameworks)
Strategy Maps
Strategy Maps
 Strategy Maps (what?)
 Four organizational perspectives of the Balance Scorecard
framework (BSC): financial, customer, internal, learning and
growth
 Both external & internal (all business activities)
 Structure: Cause-effect links/assumptions
 Build top-down (causality is bottom-up)
 Communicate direction and priorities
 Strategy Maps (why?) [15]
 A mediator between Mission, core values, Vision and Strategy to
the concrete operational actions
 Provides a visual representation
Strategy Maps
 The template [15]
The Strategy Map Meta-model
 Modeling Strategy Maps
 the Strategy Map template provides the main
concepts
 Applications from literature provide conceptual
variations emboddied through constrains
 Cardinality restrictions between classes both from the
template and literature
The Strategy Map Meta-model
 The Strategy Map Meta-model
The Strategy Map Meta-model
 Includes all elements of Strategy Maps
 Supports utilization scenarios:
 As-is
 To-be
 Generalizes some elements for applicability (Groups)
 Introduces explicitely user defined groups and
perspetives
 Separates classes and instances (application)
Future Work
 Extend the meta-model using BSC
 Provide a richer semantic basis and enrich it with
concepts from other approaches representing
busines strategies
 Start evaluating how goal modeling languages (i*,
KAOS, BMM, etc.) can express business strategy
using this meta-model
References

[1] van Lamsweerde, A.: Goal-oriented requirements engineering: a guided tour. In: 5th IEEE International Symposium on Requirements Engineering, pp. 249–
262. IEEE Press, New York (2001)

[2] Business Rules Group (BRG): The Business Motivation Model. Group (2007)

[3] Bleistein, S.J., Cox, K., Verner, J.: Validating strategic alignment of organizational IT requirements using goal modeling and problem diagrams. J. Systems
and Software 79, 362–378 (2006)

[4] Thevenet, L.H., Salinesi, C.: Aligning IS to organization’s strategy: the INSTAL method. In: Krogstie, J., Opdahl, A.L., Sindre, G. (eds.) CAiSE 2007 and
WES 2007. LNCS, vol. 4495, pp. 203–217. Springer, Heidelberg (2007)

[5] Nurcan, S., Etien, A., Kaabi, R., Zoukar, I., Rolland, C.: A strategy driven business process modelling approach. J. Business Process Management 11, 628–
649 (2005)

[6] Gordijn, J., Petit, M., Wieringa, R.: Understanding business strategies of networked value constellations using goal- and value modeling. In: 14th IEEE
International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE 2006), pp. 129–138 (2006)

[7] van der Raadt, B., Gordijn, J., Yu, E.: Exploring web services ideas from a business value perspective. In: 13th IEEE International Conference on
Requirements Engineering (RE 2005), pp. 53–62. IEEE CS, Los Alamitos (2005)

[8] Edirisuriya, A.: Design Support for e-Commerce Information Systems using Goal, Business and Process Modelling. PhD Thesis. Department of Computer
and Systems Sciences, Stockholm University (2009)

[9] Singh, S.N., Woo, C.: Investigating business-IT alignment through multi-disciplinary goal concepts. J. Requirements Engineering 14, 177–207 (2009)

[10] Babar, A., Zowghi, D., Chew, E.: Using Goals to Model Strategy Map for Business IT Alignment. In: 5th International Workshop on Business/IT Alignment
and Interoperability (BUSITAL 2010), pp. 16–30 (2010)

[11] Kavakli, E., Loucopoulos, P.: Goal Driven Requirements Engineering: Evaluation of Current Methods. In: 8th CAiSE/IFIP8.1 Workshop on Evaluation of
Modeling Methods in Systems Analysis and Design, EMMSAD (2003)

[12] Popova, V., Sharpanskykh, A.: Formal Modelling of Goals in Organizations. Technical report, VU University faculty of Science (2008)

[13] Barney, J.: Types of Competition and the Theory of Strategy: Toward an Integrative Framework. J. Academy of Management Review 11, 791–800 (1986)

[14] Anaya, V., Berio, G., Harzallah, M., Heymans, P., Matulevicius, R., Opdahl, A., Panetto, H., Verdecho, M.J.: The Unified Enterprise Modelling Language –
Overview and further work. J. Computers in Industry 61 (2009)

[15] Kaplan, R.S., Norton, D.P.: Strategy Maps: Converting Intangible Assets into Tangible Outcomes. Harvard Business School Press, Boston (2004)
Questions?
 Constantinos Giannoulis
 constantinos@dsv.su.se
 http://syslab.dsv.su.se/profile/constantinos
 Michael Petit
 mpe@info.fundp.ac.be
 http://www.fundp.ac.be/universite/personnes/page_view/01
002983/
 Jelena Zdravkovic
 jelenaz@dsv.su.se
 http://syslab.dsv.su.se/profile/jelenaz