Abstract
Business strategies are intended to guide a company across the mine fields of competitive markets through the fulfilment of strategic objectives. The design of a business strategy generally considers a SWOT operating context consisting of inherent Strengths (S) and Weaknesses (W) of a company, as well as external Opportunities (O) and potential Threats (T) that the company may be facing. Given an ever-changing and uncertain environment, it is important to continuously maintain an updated view of the operating context, in order to determine whether the current strategy is adequate. However, traditional SWOT analysis only provides support for the initial design of business strategy, as opposed to on-going analysis as new, unexpected factors appear and disappear. This paper proposes a systematic analysis for business strategy founded on models of strategic goals and stress test scenarios. Our proposal allows us to improve decision making by (i) supporting continuous scenario analysis based on current and future context and, (ii) identifying and comparing strategic alternatives and courses of action that would lead to better results.
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Acknowledgments
This work has been partially supported by the GEODAS-BI (TIN2012-37493-C03-03), and by the European Research Council (ERC) through advanced grant 267856, titled “Lucretius: Foundations for Software Evolution” (04/2011/2016) http://www.lucretius.eu. Alejandro Maté is funded by the Generalitat Valenciana (APOSTD/2014/064). Special thanks to Elda Paja for insightful discussions during the development of this work.
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Maté, A., Trujillo, J., Mylopoulos, J. (2015). Stress Testing Strategic Goals with SWOT Analysis. In: Johannesson, P., Lee, M., Liddle, S., Opdahl, A., Pastor López, Ó. (eds) Conceptual Modeling. ER 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9381. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-25264-3_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-25264-3_5
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