Automating a Strategy Requires an Enterprise Ontology

I gave a presentation on Strategic Planning last week to a small of group of colleagues. It went quite well in that some (if not all) of the material was new to them. Exposure to the concept that  organizational and competitive business design can be traced from business strategy through to IT enablement (automation) was delivered by yours truly. Upon further reflection post meeting, it then occurred to me that if theoretical traceability can be achieved top to bottom, is it not possible then to fully automate a strategy and measure its progress in some way?

The crux of this matter, IMHO, is being able to describe a strategy in machine readable terms that can then be acted upon. It turns out that StratML (which has been in development for quite some time) provides the means to successfully describe a strategy that a computer can consume. However to act on it in a meaningful way requires some level of interpretation or "intelligence" that understands it along with knowledge of the environment (both internal and external) in which the strategy executes. Deriving from this, the two main requisites for strategy automation are "sufficiently encoded intelligence or reasoning machines" that overly the strategy on to an ontology of the enterprise and the external environment in which it resides. As a result of having these two conditions met, strategies can be designed and tested before their actual implementation saving time and money.

I firmly believe that we are not far from this business nirvana. Efforts in ontological design and information capture, along with advances in AI, will be provide the necessary steps forward. The question is "who will get there first" and "will they benefit the most"?