Bridging the Gap Between Intuition and Explicit Knowledge in Strategic Business Design

Abstract

When utilizing Enterprise Architecture (EA) in strategic business design, establishing a clear and comprehensive view of the business’s logical scope is fundamental to achieving coherence and alignment. Yet, professionals engaged in strategic planning, business operations, application design, and emerging technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) often perceive these domains as fragmented and disconnected. This disconnect results in significant inconsistencies. Leveraging current ontology development and semantic analysis tools can enhance understanding of an enterprise’s logical boundaries, features, relationships, and their strategic alignment. Through a structured literature review and analysis, this research offers an internally consistent specification of an enterprise’s logical boundary. It proposes a systematic method that constrains and guides intuitive judgment for identifying missing or redundant elements within enterprise structures and demonstrates the theory through a case study. This approach aims to deepen understanding of enterprise boundaries, significantly advancing EA and strategic business design, and enabling tangible business benefits and enhanced AI integration.

Received: 24 September 2024 | Revised: 1 September 2025 | Accepted: 20 January 2026

Conflicts of Interest

The authors declare that they have no conflicts of interest to this work.

Data Availability Statement

Data sharing is not applicable to this article as no new data were created or analyzed in this study.

Author Contribution Statement

Neil Kemp: Conceptualization, Methodology, Investigation, Writing – original draft, Visualization, Supervision, Project administration. Dominic Blood: Conceptualization, Methodology, Writing – review & editing, Visualization, Project administration.