The following terms are primarily limited to the Enterprise Strategy Viewpoint. Note that the lion’s share of terms relevant to the creation of strategy and alignment to strategy exist in the Shared terms section of this ontology.
This viewpoint is useful to focus on the relationship between strategies, processes, and metrics. Any strategy that is not described in terms of a success metric is not actionable. Therefore, it is the job of the business architect to insure that strategies either break down to objectives that can be measured or directly contain the metrics. This viewpoint relates terms that are driven by the process of achieving strategic alignment.
Architectural Risk
Independently tracked risk or issue observable in the architecture. Typically captured by an Enterprise Architect. This entity may contain links to documentation of the risk, escalations, exceptions, status, events, and quantifiable measures.
Assessment Metric
When a capability is defined in an organization, there are expectations of the level of performance or maturity required in order for the business to be successful in their mission. An assessment metric defines a way in which a set of capabilities will be measured. For example, if all capabilities will be measured on the basis of their value, performance, and maturity (VPM), then there are three assessment metrics.
Capability Roadmap
A capability roadmap is a plan describing a feasible series of carefully scoped initiatives along with the sequence and estimated timelines in which those initiatives should take place, in order to achieve a business objective. Usually delivered as a document or architectural model describing the business capabilities as they are, and the changes planned over the course of a future period of time (usually one to three years).
Goal Group
A goal group is a high level taxonomy for business goals. Sometimes called pillars, themes, or focus areas, a group of goals is usually formed as a shorthand to communicate the goals of an organization to the employees, partners, and stakeholders in a simple fashion. For example, in an annual report, a corporation may announce that, for the next year, they are focused on financial goals and on restructuring the company after a recent acquisition: two goal groups.
Measurement Category
A Measurement category is a taxonomy applied to process metrics (and therefore, KPIs, which are a type of process metric). By grouping metrics into categories, methods can be employed to find objectives or initiatives where the success metrics are in opposition to one another (e.g. where the outcome of one objective is to increase a particular measure while the outcome of another is to decrease the same measure).
Objective
Objectives are measurable milestones that support a strategy and measure the achievement of a business goal. Objectives must be measurable and must have a target date.
Perspective
Derived from the notion of a “Balanced Scorecard,” as pioneered by Kaplan and Norton, a perspective is a categorization of a business strategy or objective to one of a fixed list of “levels” of strategy, where strategies at any level support the strategies ‘above” it and supported by the strategies “below” it.
The notion of a perspective is to guide the thinking of the strategist to ensure that strategies at each of the levels are considered and linked. Authors Kaplan and Norton suggest that there are four perspectives: Financial, Customer, Internal, and Learning.