Toward Modeling Strategic Plans: Requirements & Language Design Considerations

Strategic planning constitutes an essential managerial task. The existence of a coherent and a consistent strategic plan is considered a prerequisite for strategy implementation and execution. As a task, strategic planning requires a profound understanding of a firms competitive environment, organizational context and business operations. We investigate whether a domain-specific modeling method extending existing enterprise modeling methods can address essential requirements of the domain of strategic planning. As part of an on-going, multi-year design science research project, the present work motivates and justifies domain-specific requirements a method in support of strategic planning should satisfy, and identifies essential domain-specific concepts. Integration points with existing modeling languages are discussed, and initial drafts of concepts of a domain-specific modeling language (DSML) for strategic planning are outlined.