Analysing the relations between strategic and operational aspects of an enterprise: towards an ontology-based approach

In this paper, we work towards an approach to establish a connection between the goal domain and the enterprise architecture elements that are responsible for the satisfaction of goals in an enterprise. We observe this connection is far from trivial, requiring us to consider the semantics of goals, the semantics of many other enterprise elements as well as the nature of the relation between goals and these other enterprise elements. This challenge is here addressed by considering several ontological accounts for the enterprise discussed in the literature. Since no single ontological account of the enterprise covers the range of phenomena to analyse the alignment of strategic and operational aspects of the enterprise, we have conducted a survey of enterprise ontology approaches. The semantic layer established through the survey is used in the analysis of the relations between strategic and operational aspects of a healthcare organisation in a case study we have conducted. The case study illustrates how ontological theories in the established literature may support enterprise architecture analysis, in particular, facilitating the alignment between the goals and the operational elements of an organisation (such as processes, roles, and resources).