Mission and Vision

The Missions 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 won't or the mission statement will exist but the vision statement won't be 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 and 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 be able to be tied back to the vision statement providing a traceability back to the fundamental strategic direction of the organization.

Enterprise Architect allows both the mission and the vision statements to be modeled using the UML Extension mechanism of stereotypes and these statements can be included in diagrams and related to other elements such as Goals and in turn to 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.