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Business Architecture Management pp 21–33Cite as

An Architectural Approach to Strategizing: Structure and Orientation for Developing the Business Motivation

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Abstract

It has been widely acknowledged that effective strategizing in today’s competitive environment has become a challenging task and thus requires a deliberate approach. This has also driven calls for a greater cross-fertilization of the field with other disciplines. In particular, good practices from architecture management may be considered a promising means to provide strategists with a reasonable structure and orientation for developing the business motivation (including, e.g., goals, strategies, and principles). Against this background, this chapter illustrates the use of architectural thinking in strategy development. Based on a fictitious case study, it explains how the use of an architectural approach that provides a clear structure can help achieve higher consistency, effectiveness, completeness, and comprehensibility.

Keywords

  • Project Team
  • Chief Executive Officer
  • Strategic Choice
  • Enterprise Architecture
  • Swot Analysis

These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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Fig. 2.1
Fig. 2.2

Notes

  1. 1.

    Note that these strategies are formulated in a “gap-like” way to emphasize the new aspects. They may well be part of a “larger” (e.g., the overall product strategy) or more generic strategy (e.g., product leadership). They are not yet meant to represent strategic programs or even projects though (cf. Yelin 2005). In contrast, they should be considered less specific than an action plan (that includes decisions with respect to, for example, the “who” and “when”). In line with the strategy definition provided in Chap. 1, they represent the “conception preceding action” (Mintzberg 1987).

  2. 2.

    Note that such deficiencies may not necessarily be addressed at the strategic level, but may also be possible to be resolved at the lower levels of the business architecture without a strategy defined for this purpose.

  3. 3.

    Based on that, one may have also come up with a first evaluation of possible effects/impacts on the lower-level architecture (e.g., processes) (cf. Radeke and Legner 2012; Simon et al. 2014).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Scape Consulting GmbH, Cologne, Germany

    Daniel Simon

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  1. Daniel Simon
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Correspondence to Daniel Simon .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Scape Consulting GmbH, Cologne, Germany

    Daniel Simon

  2. Scape Consulting GmbH, Frankfurt am Main, Germany

    Christian Schmidt

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Simon, D. (2015). An Architectural Approach to Strategizing: Structure and Orientation for Developing the Business Motivation. In: Simon, D., Schmidt, C. (eds) Business Architecture Management. Management for Professionals. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-14571-6_2

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