Strategic response model

Introduction

The Strategic Response Model (SRM) allows organisations to capture and understand how internal or external triggers lead to deliberate, structured responses across the business. It provides traceability between cause and effect—connecting performance insights, regulatory changes, stakeholder demands, and other triggers with the actions taken to realign business architecture domains.

This model supports continuous strategic alignment by documenting why a change occurred, how it was rationalised, and what was impacted—across strategies, capabilities, initiatives, policy, and organisational units.

Components of the Strategic Response Model

The Strategic Response Model (SRM) links observed conditions—both external and internal—to formal responses across Strategy, Capabilities, Policy, Initiatives, and other domains. It is comprised of three core elements:

• Triggers: Events, insights, or conditions that prompt a response. See: Trigger

• Rationales: The reasoned justification for responding to a trigger. See Rationale

• Responses: The aligned changes or activities, captured in other business architecture domains.

This structured model enables traceable, auditable, and adaptive decision-making throughout the organisation.

Purpose

The SRM strengthens strategic governance by ensuring that:

• Business responses are traceable to defined triggers

• Rationales are explicitly captured and consistently structured

• Impact across domains and organisational units is recorded

• Organisational learning and auditability are enhanced

Structure

Each Strategic Response includes:

• A trigger: drawn from the shared trigger catalogue

• A rationale object: structured and detailed, replacing simple references

• One or more affected domains: such as policy, initiatives, or capabilities

• Impacted organisational units: using defined role types

• Response actions: steps taken or planned

• Expected outcomes: anticipated benefits or changes in performance

Trigger catalogue

Responses reference a trigger selected from a standardised catalogue of events, trends, or insights. This ensures consistency in classifying causes of change and enables systemic analysis across responses.

Affected domains

Strategic responses typically impact one or more of the following domains:

• Strategy: adjustments to goals or strategic direction

• Capabilities: development, enhancement, or decommissioning

• Initiatives: programs or projects started or stopped

• Policy: introduction or amendment of rules and frameworks

• Performance: redefinition or reweighting of KPIs

• Information: changes to how data is used or governed

• Value Stream: refinements in end-to-end value delivery

Impacted organisational units

The impactedUnits array uses standardised relationship roles (as defined in the Inter-unit Domain Relationships model). These include:

• Owning: responsible for executing or delivering the response

• Providing: delivers resources or services into the response

• Utilising: benefits directly from the response outcome

• Consuming: depends on updated processes or data

• Dependent: cannot proceed without the change

• Custodian: maintains the associated processes or information

• Governed by: subject to new or modified policies

• Supported by: indirectly enhanced by the outcome without direct contribution

Each unit listed includes a description of how it is impacted, ensuring traceability to structure and accountability.

Relationship with Rationales

Rationales play an important role in classifying and organising strategic responses. Ensure that the trigger catalogue—which lists common environmental or operational triggers prompting strategic responses—is up to date. Reference to the trigger catalogue within this page ensures that rationales are accurately categorised based on their initiating context, improving traceability from external or internal stimuli through to strategic objectives, initiatives, and performance metrics.

Strategic Response Model JSON Schema

See: https://github.com/Orthogramic/Orthogramic_Metamodel

Schema fields

This format ensures that the strategic response definition is:

• Declarative (not procedural or UI-specific),

• Traceable (everything points to reusable metamodel entities),

• Reusable (across tools, audits, planning activities).