Towards Strategic Intelligence with Ontology Based Enterprise Modelling and ABC

What a company needs to know about its business environment ( i.e., its activities, resources, markets, customers, products, services and costs) to plan for its current and future successful functioning needs to be disseminated organization-wide. One of the basic challenges for senior management is creating a mindset about the present and the future in order to anticipate trends and directions to be taken. For example, how does an enterprise decide upon a directional change in operational and business processes before its too late when they have realized market losses due to high product and service costs? Strategic intelligence is what a company needs to know of its business environment to enable it to gain insight into its present processes, anticipate and manage change for the future, design appropriate strategies that will create business value for customers, and improve profitability in current and new markets. It is not surprising then, due to a lack of strategic intelligence, company executives wait for alarm bells to sound off before they seriously consider alternative paths. Unfortunately, it is too late then. Hence, the need for the effective development and dissemination of strategic intelligence within an enterprise is essential. This paper discusses the importance of ontology based enterprise modelling and activity-based costing (ABC) towards the achievement and dissemination of strategic intelligence on an enterprise-wide basis.