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Mission and Vision

The Mission and Vision statements will typically already exist when an architecture program is set up or a Business Architecture is commenced, but there will be some cases where they do not exist, or the Mission statement exists but the Vision statement is not available. These two very simple statements have different purposes:

  • A Mission statement describes the line of business the organization undertakes and what its purpose is
  • The Vision statement is like a summary of the organization's goals or a synopsis of the strategic plan; it describes where the organization wants to be in the future and what its aspirations are

These two statements are useful to include in a Business Architecture as they provide a very brief and crisp definition of what the organization is and where it wants to be. The business goals should link back to the Vision statement, providing a traceability to the fundamental strategic direction of the organization.

Using Enterprise Architect, there are a number of ways in which you can create Mission and Vision statements in your model, depending on how you want to define and use the statements and the objects representing them. Some of the ways are described in the remaining sections of this topic.

As an Encrypted Document

If you are defining new Mission and Vision statements, and want to record the background to each statement, what the statements encapsulate, how they were devised and who contributed, you can generate these broader and more detailed statements as a model document from a Pattern selected from the Model Wizard. This document is core to the business and to developments within the business, so it is generated as an encrypted document with password protection. This safeguards the document from uncontrolled access and editing; when you want to publish it you can save it to an external file location for public access.

Follow these steps:

  1. In the Browser window, right-click on the Package to hold the document, and select the 'Add a Model using Wizard' option. The Start Page 'Create from Pattern' tab (Model Wizard) displays.
  2. Click on the <perspective name> button and select 'All'.
  3. In the Filter Bar directly below the <perspective name> button, type 'Mission and Vision'. The option 'Encrypted Document Artifacts' displays in the left-hand panel, expanded to show 'Mission and Vision'.
  4. Click on 'Mission and Vision', and carefully read the Pattern description displayed in the right-hand panel.
  5. Click on the Create Model(s) button to create the document in the selected Package. The element shows in the Browser window in this format:
  6. Double-click on the element to decrypt and open the document in the document editor. A prompt displays to enter the password for the document.
  7. Type in the password (as indicated in the Pattern description you read in the Model Wizard). The template document opens for you to complete.

The encrypted document is also a Custom Document. The Mission and Vision template provides a number of styles and boiler-plate sections and text, but you can type in and format your own text as Static text, and also drag in objects from the Browser window, which become Dynamic text sections in the document. Each Dynamic text section has its own user-selected template or template fragment to format the information drawn from the object, and that information is refreshed from the model whenever the document is opened or whenever you specifically prompt the system to update the information.

For more information, see the Custom Document and Artifact Help topics.

As Stereotyped Requirements

If you want to use short, direct and essential Mission and Vision statements, you can model them using the UML Extension mechanism of stereotypes on elements. The statement elements can be included in diagrams and related to other elements such as Goals and, in turn, Objectives. These diagrams are compelling for senior executives and line managers, who can see clearly that the architecture work and the subsequent implementation initiatives can be traced back to the strategic primitives.

In this illustration, a Logical (Class) diagram has been created, and two Requirement elements have been dragged onto the diagram from the Common page of the Toolbox.

Through the Properties window, in the 'Stereotype' field, one Requirement element has been given the stereotype 'Enterprise Architecture::mission', and the other the stereotype 'Enterprise Architecture::vision'. The name of each element is the Mission or Vision statement itself.

As Other Types of Element

Depending on which modeling language or tool you are using, Mission statements and Vision statements can be represented by various types of element. For example, in:

  • TOGAF, in the Conceptual Framework and the Business Motivation Model, a Mission or Vision can be defined in the unencrypted Linked Document of a Document Artifact
  • A Strategic Map, the statements can be represented by stereotyped Class elements
  • A Business Motivation Model, the statements are represented by stereotyped Requirement elements
  • UPDM 2.0, the statements can be rendered as stereotyped Activity elements
  • The Zachman Framework, the statements are defined by simple Artifact elements

In each case, you drag the element icon from the appropriate Toolbox page and then either apply the statement as the element name or define a more detailed statement in a Linked Document on the element.

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