Toward An Ontology of Strategy in an Enterprise Context

Abstract

What is meant by "strategy" and what concepts are involved in its creation are not well understood, and there is significant inconsistency in the way they are all used. It was hypothesised that current tools and techniques for ontology development and semantic analysis could be effectively applied to understand better what is meant by the term strategy and understand their nature and relationships. A literature review was conducted to identify how practitioners and academia view the subject, and the results organised using structured analysis. The result is a more complete, internally consistent view of the features of strategy definition. By applying structured analysis, the components and relationships used to form strategy and therefore the requisite structure of strategy in the enterprise context are uncovered. In this way, the specification that makes up a strategy is better understood using conceptual and systems dynamics models. In this way, the nature, and relationships necessary and sufficient to describe the multiple dimensions of strategy are exposed.