A strategy is a long range plan for achieving organizational goals to meet mission priorities while effectively using available resources. A strategy is often formulated to help an organization achieve an economic, competitive, or positional advantage. As a long range plan, a strategy is expected to be relatively stable but will still evolve over time. An organization establishes its enterprise goals and high level business strategy, and then uses its enterprise architecture to help identify changes needed in its processes, data, security, IT, and other elements to execute the strategy. The organization next formulates a transition plan to make those changes and provides input to budget planning efforts to guide investments. The enterprise architecture is intended to demonstrate that business direction and IT investments are clearly aligned.

Organizational goals and business strategy are key inputs to planning an enterprise architecture. Based on the degree of business change and technology change anticipated, an organization will emphasize different parts of its enterprise architecture. If enterprise architecture resources are limited, the enterprise architecture planners choose a strategy for enterprise architecture development or update that will best address organizational strategic direction using the resources available.

References

1. Martinez, C., Enterprise Architectures: A Just-in-Time Approach for Decision-Making, The MITRE Corporation – 2014 Summary: This paper presents a summary of the full range of potential uses of enterprise architectures (EAs), some of challenges facing the users of EAs, and practical approach for developing them incrementally over time to provide “just in time” utility to decision makers.