A FRAMEWORK FOR ANALYZING BUSINESS/INFORMATION

SYSTEM ALIGNMENT REQUIREMENTS

Islem Gmati

and Selmin Nurcan

1,2

Université Paris 1- Panthéon Sorbonne

Centre de Recherche en Informatique

90, rue de Tolbiac 75634, Paris cedex 13, France

IAE de Paris (Sorbonne Business School) – Université Paris 1 – Panthéon Sorbonne

21, rue Broca 75005, Paris, France

Keywords: Strategic alignment, evolving environment, information system flexibility and evolution capacities.

Abstract: In order to provide a competitive advantage to the enterprise, the business strategy and processes and its

information system (IS) need to be aligned. Achieving strategic alignment continues to be a major concern

for business executives and becomes more difficult to handle in an evolving environment. The literature

provides conceptual frameworks dividing a company representation in independent and exchanging layers

and aiming at the strategic alignment. In this paper, we describe eight among these works. Aiming a better

understanding of the Business/IS alignment requirements, we propose an analysis framework, in which we

position the studied approaches, and we bring out the most important results related to the forces and

weaknesses of these approaches.

1 INTRODUCTION

Today, organizations evolve in a competitive and

changing environment that can be at the origin of

factors or forces, which oblige them to change. Thus,

to survive and to remain competitive, a company has

to evolve in adequacy with its environment.

In the course of time, we noted that organizations

change their processes and their strategy to respond to

constraints of the environment, but their information

systems remain often unchanged. However, an

organization cannot work efficiently if it does not

have a coherent information system (IS). Thus the

problem of the strategic alignment arose often when

the need to make “move” the IS in phase with the

strategy of the company is identified. Indeed, in a

quickly evolving environment, companies have to

adapt constantly their IS in order to comply more

effectively with the constraints of new technologies,

new needs and/or new rules. Moreover, it is not

possible to stop the IS to build another one, it should

rather evolve in a continuous way in order to remain

in correspondence with the organization strategy. We

can talk about the flexibility and the evolution

capacities of the IS.

Furthermore, change often influences the

organization as a whole, from company strategy to the

business processes and the IS. To remain competitive

in changing environments, it is very important that

companies align their IS on their organizational

processes, their goals and their strategies (Campbell et

al. 2004). Even if the interest of the alignment is

widely recognized, its realization remains too often

limited. Few leaders consider that the IS and the

processes of their organization are aligned (Adams et

al. 2003). Luftman and Maclean (2004) identifies two

main causes: (i) the actors of the organization do not

know what the alignment is and (ii) there is an

absence of communication and understanding

between the world of the business and that of

information technologies (IT).

For a comprehensive study of the alignment

requirements, we developed a framework based on

four perspectives called also worlds (Jarke et al.,

1990). Each world is characterized using facets,

which are composed of attributes. Nevertheless, we

point out that only the perspectives and the structure

of the framework are generic. Facets and attributes

were defined for the purpose of this study. They

characterize the requirements that we identified as

essential for analyzing and comparing the Business/IS

alignment methods, approaches or frameworks. Our

long-term research objective is to enhance the IS

401

Gmati I. and Nurcan S. (2007).

A FRAMEWORK FOR ANALYZING BUSINESS/INFORMATION SYSTEM ALIGNMENT REQUIREMENTS.

In Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems - ISAS, pages 401-409

DOI: 10.5220/0002362504010409

 SciTePress

engineering approaches and practices with those

requirements in their early phases. Section 2 presents

eight approaches on Business/IS and Business/

Strategy alignments. Section 3 presents the developed

framework and Section 4 analyzes the presented

approaches with respect to the proposed framework.

2 STATE OF THE ART

The strategy and the objectives of any enterprise are

achieved by implementing business processes (BPs)

which are supported/facilitated by the enterprise IS. It

seems not realistic to consider an organizational

change without any impact on the IS or an evolution

of the IS which does not call any change on BPs or

objectives of the enterprise (Nurcan & Edme, 2005).

Section 2.1 presents approaches from the literature

which purposes are to align the IS on the business

(more especially to its way-of functioning). These

approaches help to understand and to exploit the

relationships between the BPs and the systems that

are supposed to support and to guide their execution

Section 2.2 presents approaches that aim to specify

the links between the strategy of a company and the

implemented BPs. Finally, section 2.3 recalls the

work of Kaplan and Norton (1996) that offers a

completely different glance on various perspectives of

a company and the relationships between them. We

tried to highlight the strengths of

those approaches in

order to define the facets of our analyzis framework.

2.1 Business/IS Alignment

2.1.1 ARIS Framework

(1)

Scheer and Nuttgens (2000) present the Architecture

of Integrated Information System (ARIS) that is

composed of four interdependently connected layers:

process engineering, process planning and control,

workflow control and application systems. The

process engineering layer provides techniques for

optimizing, evaluating and ensuring the quality of

processes. Reference models provide an initial process

engineering solution and document process know-how

that can be reutilized for further modeling. The

process planning and control layer describes current

BPs based principally on the cost analysis. The first

two layers concern business managers. The workflow

control layer converts BPs into IT support and is

responsible for the execution of BPs. In the

application systems layer, information and documents

delivered to the workplaces are specifically processed.

2.1.2 The Integrated Enterprise Framework

(2)

To remain competitive, organizations must be able to

adapt quickly their way of providing services and

products when change occurs. Papazoglou and Van

den Heuvel (2000) provide a methodology which

purpose is to link enterprise models to wrapped

legacy system modules, namely BALES (binding

Business-Applications to Legacy systems)

methodology. This methodology reveals also how

such mappings can address business change

requirements. This framework contains five layers.

The business objects layer plays a central role in

capturing the semantics of business entities and

processes. The BPs layer aims to provide generic BPs

and a set of basic building blocks. The workflow layer

assigns BPs to actors, and moves the work forward

from one actor to the next. Workflow activities may

invoke components from existing applications, for

instance legacy objects, and combine them with

newly developed applications. Business objects and

BPs are oriented towards the fulfillment of business

goals. BALES prescribes a two-step approach to

incorporate business change: (i) To adapt existing

enterprise model to reflect the new business reality;

(ii) To determine a new mapping between enterprise

models and legacy systems.

2.1.3 The Approach of Longepe

(3)

Longepe (2004) distinguishes four layers of enterprise

and IS architecture: business, functional, applicative

and technical. The business architecture describes the

organization structure with regard to its business

activities. An activity constitutes a stage of a business

process and specifies the achievement of a business

goal. Functions are derived starting from the activities

and going from macro functions to elementary ones.

The latter are defined in one-to-one correspondence

with the services supported by IS. The elementary

functions are organized in the functional architecture.

Two approaches allow mapping business and

functional layers. The top down approach (i) starts

from the strategy of the company, (ii) deduces for

each business objective the BPs allowing to achieve it

and for each business activity the IS functionalities

supporting it, and (iii) defines finally the support

system. The bottom up approach starts from the

operations performed by actors and elicits the

business organization and objectives requiring those

operations. The applicative architecture allows

structuring the support system in communicating

software components. In the technical architecture,

the technical components as well as the information

(source, model, documentation,…) related to the life

cycle of the system are defined.

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2.1.4 The Approach of Wieringa

(4)

Wieringa et al. (2003) proposes an integrated

framework for the co-design of the BPs and the IS

architecture, in which the business and the supporting

applications form a reactive system. This work

provides a classification of system properties and

highlights the classical distinction between process

and product. The product may be an IS or an

enterprise architecture and has functional and quality

properties. The former are services offered to the

environment, and the latter characterize the value that

the system provides for its stakeholders. Three

functional properties characterize system services: (i)

the behavior aspect consists of the ordering of

services over time, (ii) the communication aspect

consists of the interactions with other entities (people,

devices, businesses, and software) during the delivery

of the service, and (iii) the semantic aspect consists of

the meaning of the symbols exchanged during the

service. In general, entities at one layer use services of

entities at lower layers and provide services to entities

at higher layers. Finally, the refinement dimension

allows describing entities belonging to a service level

at a higher level of abstraction (fewer details) or at a

higher level of refinement (more details).

2.1.5 SEAM Methodology

(5)

Wegman (2003) considers the enterprise as a complex

system which key characteristics is its continuous

evolution. A SEAM (Systemic Enterprise Architecture

Methodology) project is iterative because its

environment continuously evolves. Thus the enterprise

architecture model can be adapted to represent the

changes which occur (on the business level or the IS

level). SEAM provides three kinds of development

activities. (i) The goal of the multi-level modeling is to

produce a new model, or to modify an existing model

of the enterprise. (ii) The goal of the multi-level design

is to identify gaps between As-Is and To-Be

representations and to reduce them. (iii) The goal of the

multi-level deployment is to transform what is

described in the organizational levels for the To-Be

state in artifacts that can be executed by people or

software systems.

2.1.6 Synthesis

The main objective of the studied approaches is to

specify and to control organization in a flexible way

in order to gain the ability to adapt it to the market

conditions. All of them try to reconfigure BPs to

satisfy the environment changing requirements. To

this end, they allow to:

 specify the enterprise architecture using several

layers of representation, considering that each

layer adds a new perspective (from models on

objectives and processes to executable software

components) to the higher layer but do not specify

how to map those layers,

 simulate and evaluate BPs in order to improve

their efficiency,

 develop links between the reconfigured processes

and the new applications built on the legacy ones

by adding new functionalities, and

 suggest to decompose the support system into

loosely coupled small modules (interoperability

requirement).

2.2 Business/Strategy Alignment

2.2.1 Strategic Alignment Model (SAM)

(6)

Henderson and Venkatraman (1989) developed a

model for conceptualizing the strategic management of

information technology (IT). The Strategic Alignment

Model (SAM) makes a distinction between the external

perspective of IT (IT strategy) and the internal focus of

IT (IT infrastructure and processes). The same

distinction is done for the business domain. This

implies two types of integration: (i) strategic integration

between IT (strategy) and business (strategy) which

establishes the capability of IT at a strategic level, and

(ii) operational integration between IT infrastructure

and processes and organizational internal

infrastructure and BPs. SAM proposes four domains

of strategic choice: business strategy, IT strategy,

organization infrastructure and processes, and IT

infrastructure and processes. The change cannot occur

in a field without influencing the others. The model

provides also two types of alignment: strategic fit

(between external and internal domains) and

functional integration (between business and

technology domains). Authors argue that neither

strategic nor functional integration alone is sufficient

to perform Business/Strategy alignment.

2.2.2 EKD-CMM Approach

(7)

EKD-CMM (Enterprise Knowledge Development -

Change Management Method) (Barrios & Nurcan,

2004) is a method to documenting an enterprise, its

objectives, BPs and support systems, helping

enterprises to consciously develop schemes for

implementing changes. The inter-connected set of

EKD-CMM models describing an enterprise is

structured in three layers: Enterprise Goal Model,

Enterprise Process Model and Enterprise IS Model.

The first two layers focus on intentional and

organizational aspects of the enterprise. The third

layer allows defining the requirements for an

information system. EKD-CMM satisfies two needs:

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403

assisting enterprise knowledge modeling and

guiding the enterprise modeling and the

organizational transformation processes.

2.2.3 The Bleistein’s Approach

(8)

Bleistein et al. (2005) proposes an unified model to

enable validation of system requirements with regard

to the business strategy. The aim is to incorporate an

explicit understanding of business strategy within

requirements engineering activities as a means of

ensuring alignment between requirements for a

system and the business strategy it is intended to

support. This is based on a framework, called the

Motivation Model (proposed by the Business Rules

Group), which describes the semantics of a business

strategy and its alignment with technology without

proposing any specific means of representation.

Considering similarities between BRG-Model and I*,

Bleistein et al. applied I* to BRG-Model with the aim

of unifying the business strategy model with the

system requirements model. The approach proposes

to use a technique to analyze the business strategy

(VMOST) and to model it using a goal-oriented

notation. It also suggests using context diagrams

resulting from Jackson’s problem diagrams. The goal

model helps to ensure that requirements, at lowest

levels, are in harmony with and provide support for

objectives of the business strategy at higher levels.

Problem diagrams help to situate requirements

explicitly in the context to which they refer.

2.3 Another Vision of the Organization

The Balanced Scorecard (BSC) approach was

developed for the strategic management at the

beginning of the 90’s in order to provide a clear

prescription of the performance measurement. The

BSC allows analyzing the organization according to

four perspectives, or axis, interconnected by “cause-

effect” relations that draw the strategy of the

organization:

 The financial axis includes the long-term

objectives of the company.

 The customer axis identifies the market

segments on which the company wishes to be

competitive.

 The internal processes axis includes the

essential BPs to implement in order to achieve

objectives of customers and shareholders.

 The organizational learning axis develops

internal objectives and organizational means to

improve the satisfaction of stakeholders and to

facilitate thus facilitate the achievement of the

objectives of the three other axes.

The BSC is a frame, which allows to integrate

strategic indicators and to propose performance

determiners relative to these four axes. These

determiners lean on a translation of the organization

strategy in objectives and concrete indicators.

3 ANALYSIS FRAME

To build our analysis frame, we were inspired of the

work presented in (Jarke et al., 1990), (Rolland, 1998)

the “four worlds” framework. The subject world

contains the knowledge of the domain about which

the system world has to supply information. In our

case, the subject is the strategic alignment. The system

world contains the models to represent the subject

world. The usage world describes the organizational

environment of the system, i.e. the goals of the actors

and the way they use the system to carry out their

work; this world allows also analyzing the objectives

of the strategic alignment. The development world

concerns the engineering process that allows us to

build the various models of the system world. To

study and to compare the various aspects of the

studied approaches, facets characterize each world. A

facet defines a particular aspect of an approach. It is

composed of a set of attributes that allow us to clarify,

through the possible values, the position of an

approach with regard to the others. The values of

attributes can be of a predefined type (integer,

boolean …) or an enumerated type (Enum {x,y}).

3.1 The Subject World

Our universe of discourse concerns the strategic

alignment. Two facets characterize it:

A. Nature of the alignment: it is defined by a

unique attribute Nature. In the literature, we

distinguished four types of alignment. The

business/IS alignment consists in understanding

and exploiting the relations between the business

processes and the system to be built. The

strategy/business alignment consists in specifying

the links between the objectives of the company

and the implemented business processes. The

business strategy/IT strategy alignment represents

the link between the business and the IT strategies.

More specifically, the latter takes in charge the

capacity of the technology to determine and to

support the business strategy. The IT strategy/IS

alignment explains how the strategic use of IT can

serve the agility of the IS. This presents an

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innovative character that limits its taking of

consideration in the planning initiatives.

B. Nature of the change: this facet is characterized

using two attributes:

a. Nature: the literature provides various types of

change for BPs:

 Ad hoc: the change is made in a dynamic

way during the process performance.

 Evolutionary: it is often the result of an effort

of reorganization aiming processes

reengineering by improving their behavior.

 Corrective: occurs when an error is perceived

during the realization of the process.

b. Origin: according to (Barrios, 2001), two types

of contextual forces can cause the change in the

organization: internal and external. Internal forces

issues from the organization need and/or wish to

grow or to evolve. External forces are constraints

imposed by the external environment of the

organization.

Nature of the alignment:

Nature: Enum {business/IS alignment, strategy/business

alignment, business strategy/IT strategy alignment, IT

strategy/SI alignment}

Nature of the change:

Nature: Enum {ad hoc, evolutionary, corrective}

Origin: Enum {internal, external}

3.2 The Usage World

The objectives assigned to the alignment between the

various organization representation layers and the

intentions of the individuals, which manage this

alignment, are the purpose of this world. Four facets

allow defining them:

A. Purpose of the alignment: this facet is

characterized by one attribute Purpose. To align the

enterprise global model elements, the company tries

to adapt its BPs to the changes, to improve them in

order to better achieve its goals and to build new

BPs in order to integrate new functionalities. If the

alignment already exists between these elements, the

company tries to maintain it.

B. Strategic alignment: this facet characterized by the

attribute Alignment perspectives can take four

values corresponding to the four perspectives cited in the

SAM (Henderson & Venkatraman, 1999) according to the

business strategy or the IT strategy is the driving force.

 Strategy execution: this perspective views the

business strategy as the driver of both

organizational design choices and the design of IS

infrastructure. IT management only implements

the strategy formulated by the top management.

 Technology transformation: this perspective

views also the business strategy as the driver but

is not constrained by the organization design.

However, it involves the formulation of an IT

strategy that support the chosen business strategy

and the articulation of the required IS

infrastructure and processes.

 Competitive potential: unlike the two previous

perspectives that considered business strategy as

given, this perspective allows the modification of

business strategy (and the organizational

infrastructure and BPs) via emerging IT

capabilities.

 Service level: this perspective focuses on how to

build a world-class IS service organization. In this

perspective, the role of business strategy is indirect.

This perspective is often viewed as necessary (but

not sufficient) to ensure the effective use of IT and

to be responsive to the growing and fast-changing

demands of the end-users.

C. The communication constitutes an essential mean to

support the strategic orientation of the organization. Indeed,

experts from various departments have to communicate in

order to share information and ensure awareness of the

smallest problem.

D. The comprehension of the user represents the

facility of comprehension of requirements related to

the alignment by the involved actors.

Purpose of the alignment:

Purpose: Enum {to adapt, to improve, to build, to maintain}

Strategic alignment:

Perspectives alignment:

Enum{strategy execution,technology

transformation, competitive potential, service level}

Communication:

Communication: boolean

Comprehension of the user:

Comprehension of the user: boolean

3.3 The System World

The system world is related to the representation of

the IS supporting the BPs and the organization

strategy as well as the representation of the alignment

between them. We define six facets. Five of them,

cover, refinement, traceability, modularization and

capture of the change are characterized by an

attribute of the same name:

A. The cover allows capturing the capacity of the

models to represent the knowledge relative to the

strategic alignment. We distinguish activity, product,

context, decision and intention oriented models.

B. The refinement specifies the model contents.

Models can include knowledge related to various

layers of interest namely: intentional, organizational,

IS and technological layers.

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B. The traceability is the capacity to draw explicit

relationships between the elements of the connected

models (Wegman, 2003).

D. The flexibility: a flexible IS has the ability to be

adapted to the BPs changes. This facet is measured by

four attributes:

a. The modularization allows decomposing

enterprise models into significant chunks. It

facilitates the comprehension of the user and the re-

use of the chunks.

b. The capability to re-use existing components is

an essential requirement in order to build a flexible

IS. Indeed, if a change occurs, the system has to

evolve in accordance with the new reality where

legacy systems often remain. So, those legacy

components have to be re-used, instead of

completely re-design the whole system.

c. In order to be flexible, the system has to be able

to capture the change. Indeed, a system cannot

adapt itself to its environment if it is not able to

detect the changes which occur (Sadiq &

Orlowska, 1998). This attribute can take three

values: no if the way of capturing the change is not

defined, trigger if such a concept allows activating

the modifications and other if another method is

used.

Cover:

Cover: Enum {activity, product, context, decision, intention}

Refinement:

Refinement: Enum {intentional, organizational, SI,

technological}

Traceability:

Traceability: boolean

Flexibility:

Modularization: boolean

Re-use of the existing components: boolean

Capture of the change: Enum {no, trigger, other}

3.4 The Development World

The development world handles the engineering process

of the IS which representations are stored in the system

world. In our case, the development world concerns the

IS engineering process models and integrates the

requirements of the strategic alignment for creating as

as well as for maintaining the fit between business

(strategy and processes) and IS. We are particularly

interested in the aspects of IS engineering, defined in

three facets:

A. Development approach characterized by three

attributes:

a. The nature of the development process, it can be ad

hoc or systematic.

b. The paradigm of modeling: the values of the

attribute “Cover” (system world) for business

process to be modeled, remain valid for the IS

engineering processes.

c. The capitalization of knowledge aims to promote

the use of the established enterprise knowledge

that proved its effectiveness. It is a boolean.

B. The support provided for the IS engineering

process is defined using two attributes:

a. The software support; it can be automatic, manual

or mixed.

b. The infrastructure of execution: it has to be generic

and/or interoperable in order to facilitate the

integration of the existing objects into new

applications.

C. The guidance: it provides a range of possibilities

of actions by taking into account the level of

organizational maturity, the delay obtained to master

the change, etc… Several attributes can characterize

the guidance, but we are interested in our analysis to

the following ones:

a. Existence; it specifies if the development

process is guided or not.

b. Granularity of the guidelines provided to guide IS

engineers. Guidelines can be specified in a very

general way, for instance, the definition of the

major stages of the development process; or

provide the details of all development activities,

the handled resources and the situations in

which these activities can be performed.

Development approach:

Nature of the dev

process: Enum {ad hoc, systematic}

Modeling paradigm: Enum {context, decision,

intention, activity, product}

Knowledge capitalization: boolean

Execution support:

Software support: Enum {automatic, mixed, manual}

Infrastructure of execution: Enum {generic, inter operable}

Guidance:

Existence: boolean

Granularity: Enum {micro, macro}

4 DISCUSSION

The analysis framework developed above allowed us

to identify the various aspects of the alignment

approaches and to classify them. Based on this

classification, it was possible to highlight the main

characteristics of these approaches. The classification

facilitates also to understand the needs of the IS in

terms of adaptability and flexibility as well as the

stakeholders requirements concerning the strategic

alignment in terms of comprehension and

communication between Business and the IT teams.

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Concerning the characteristics of the IS engineering

approaches to fulfill the alignment requirements, we

retain as essential the traceability and the flexibility

expressed by the re-use, the modularization and the

capture of the change. The traceability is a relevant

argument for the alignment between various

organization representation layers (Longepe, 2004),

(Wegman, 2003), (Bleistein et al., 2005).

The re-use is directly related to the change.

According to the change requirements and to the

situation in hand, the existing models are adapted to the

new business reality or new applications are developed.

Often, existing components (legacy systems) remain.

Software components have to be modular and the most

independent possible to be more easily re-used and

adapted to the environment evolutions (Papazoglou &

Van den Heuvel, 2000), (Longepe, 2004).

We notice that the majority of the studied approaches

use activity-oriented models to represent business

processes (Scheer & Nuttgens, 2000), (Longepe, 2004),

(Papazoglou & Van den Heuvel, 2000) and (Wegman,

2003). However, in a changing environment, the

flexibility of the business process models is essential.

Activity-oriented models offer a linear view, which is

inadequate to represent flexible business processes.

Few approaches offer decision-oriented or context-

oriented models (Barrios & Nurcan, 2004) which are

more appropriate to represent business processes

requiring flexibility.

Few of the presented approaches are able to

capture changes (Scheer & Nuttgens, 2000),

(Wieringa et al., 2003) i.e. to define the way the

various significant events occur. Some approaches

use triggers (Scheer & Nuttgens, 2000) and define

exceptions that allow capturing changes. Nevertheless,

the definition of exceptions supposes that changes

should be foreseen. To summarize, we can affirm

that the existing approaches are rather moderately

adapted to the change handling.

With regard to the requirements of the alignment

process, the communication between business and IT

experts as well as their understanding of what is the

alignment seem very important to us. The

communication constitutes a good means to understand

the change requirements and to propagate them on all

units and levels of the company. Moreover, in order to

maintain the alignment (when it exists), measures

are useful to analyze the gaps between the current

and the future situations. The strategy becomes

really the affair of all if everybody understands it

and is motivated to apply it (Kaplan & Norton,

1996). The communication and the comprehension

of the user are closely dependent concepts. Bleistein

et al. (2005) indicate two success factors for

defining the alignment between IS and business

strategies : (i) the mutual comprehension of the

business strategy between business and IS managers

and (ii) the incorporation of this comprehension in

the IS development.

An important aspect, which was neglected by the

majority of the studied approaches and which

constitutes a vital criterion for the companies, is the

strategic links for the business as as well for the IT

purposes. Indeed, to remain competitive and to

ensure its adaptability, the company has to attach a

great importance to its external environment and to

integrate its requirements in its organizational and

technological infrastructures (startegic fit). In spite

of the importance of this aspect, we notice that it was

approached only by (Henderson & Venkatraman, 1989)

which emphasizes also the importance of the IT

strategy in the implementation of the business strategy

(strategy integration). In the other approaches, even if the

environment of the company and the strategic alignment

were pointed in some of them (Wieringa et al., 2003),

(Wegman, 2003), the importance of the IT domain was

not explicitly specified. Other authors emphasize the role

of information technologies. For instance, (Morton,

2001) makes several assumptions on this subject,

among which: (i) IT allow a better efficiency on the

World Facets Attributs Approaches

Alignment nature nature Business/SI: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7;

Strategy/business: 6, 7, 8;

Business strategy/IT strategy: 6;

IT strategy/SI: none

Nature Ad hoc: 1, 4, 7, 8; Evolutionary :

all ; Corrective: 1, 5

Subject world

Change

Origin Interne, extern: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7,

Alignment

purpose

Purpose To adapt: all; to built: 2, 3, 6; to

improve: 1, 3, 5, 6, 7; to maintain:

4, 5, 7

Strategic

alignment

Alignment

perspectives

Strategy implementation: all,

Technology potential: 6;

Competitive potential: 6; Service

level: 6

Communication communication Yes: 3, 5, 7, 8; No: 1, 2; NS: 4, 6

Usage world

User

comprehension

User

comprehension

Yes: 1, 5, 7, 8; NS: 2, 3, 4, 6

Cover

Product Oriented: 5; Activity

Oriented: 1, 2, 4, 7; Context

Oriented: none; Decision

Oriented: 4, 5, 7; Intention

Oriented: 7, 8

Refinement

Intentional: 2, 4, 6, 7, 8;

Organizational: all, SI: 2, 3, 4, 5,

6, 7; Technologic: 1, 3, 4, 5, 6

Traceability Traceability Yes: 2, 3, 5, 7, 8; NS: 1, 4, 6

Modularization Yes: 1, 2, 3, 4; No: 7; NS: 5, 6, 8

Capture of the

change

Trigger: 2, 4; NS: 1, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8

System world

Flexibility

Re-use Yes: 2, 3, 4; No: 7; NS: 1, 5, 6, 8

Dev

process

nature

Ad hoc: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8;

Systematic: 7

Modeling

paradigm

Contextual: 7; decisional: 1, 2, 3,

4, 5; Intentional: none; Product

Oriented: none, Activity

Oriented: none; NS: 6, 8

Development

approach

Knowledge

capitalization

Yes: 1, 7; No: 4, 6, 8; NS: 2, 3, 5

Software support Mixed: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; Automatic:

7; Manual: none; NS: 6, 8

Execution support

Execution

infrastructure

Generic: 1, 2, 3, 4; Inter operable:

2, 3; NS: 5, 6, 7, 8

Existence Yes: 4, 7; No: 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 8

Development world

Guidance

Granularity Micro: 4; Macro: 7

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407

value chain, (ii) IT allow an increase in the size, the

complexity and the reactivity of the company while

preserving its flexibility, (iii) IT raise the required

level of competence but also the motivation of the

staff. Indeed, these technologies changed radically our

world, and a major importance is required in order to

ensure effectively the strategy/business/IT alignment

in the organizations.

5 CONCLUSION

In order to gain a comprehensive understanding of the

alignment requirements, it seemed relevant to us to

define an analysis framework. We built our framework

on the “four worlds” (Jarke et al., 1990) which already

proved efficiency in several disciplines like IS

engineering or requirements engineering. Facets and

attributes of each world were specifically developed for

analyzing and comparing Business/IS alignment abilities

of IS engineering methods and frameworks. Once the

framework was established, we used it to analyze eight

approaches aiming to the alignment between business

(strategy and processes) and IT. The definition of this

framework and the various analyses we performed

highlighted three important concepts:

- The communication between the specialists of the

company constitutes a good means to share knowledge

and to better understand the organization strategy and

consequently to facilitate its implementation.

- The flexibility of business and IS processes that

constitutes an important characteristic in an

evolutionary environment since it can allow the IS

to serve the strategy of the company and to change

in adequacy with it.

- The importance of the integration of IT

capabilities in the business strategy. Indeed,

considering the importance of the IT, decision

makers have to acquire a sufficient comprehension of

them, in the strategy of the company, in order to

exploit them effectively.

The opportunities related to the potential of the IT,

the motivation and the coordination between the

collaborators play a key role in the success of IS

projects.

Our aim is to extend IS engineering methods in order

to enhance their capability for anticipating the

Strategy/Business/IS alignment requirements. The IS

engineering method which will be just extended for

illustrating our purpose is EKD-CMM, already applied

in many professional contexts. However, the method

chunks, which will be provided for the alignment

requirements, should be generic because they have

vocation to enhance any IS engineering method.

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