The research field argues for the importance of aligning business and IT, since organizations that has conducted a high degree of alignment in general perform better than other organizations. This is not easy to achieve, aligning business and IT is still one of the top challenges for organizations. This study aims to examine previous research to identify and describe scientifically validated ways of achieving and keeping business and IT aligned. To do this a systematic literature review is conducted. The result from the systematic literature review is processed to identify similarities between the different ways of achieving and keeping business and IT aligned. The study contributes with a theoretical ground for future research and for interested students and practitioners who want to gain insights in the field.

Over the past few years information technology (IT) and business alignment has become a great concern to organizations. To achieve alignment has become a daunting task for organizations due to rapid changes in business environment and lack of IT support. In business organizations business processes and IT are interrelated and interact with each other where one entity influences to another entity i.e. evolution in business processes requires evolution in IT and vice versa. When this co-evolution is not well aligned, a gap is created due to wrong configuration between business requirements and IT deployment. Organizations usually strive to bridge the gap by implementing business and IT strategies (i.e. top-down planning) and tend to ignore other aspects of the co-evolution. Alignment is a continuous co-evolutionary process in which all components of business and IT are interrelated and enhance organization performance. The co-evolution between business and IT is not restricted to a level but it occurs at all levels and therefore, it is necessary to understand and study co-evolution at all levels within organizations. This thesis presents a co-evolutionary framework that helps to study and understand the co-evolution at three levels i.e. strategic level, operational level and individual level in an integrated fashion. The three levels need to co-evolve so that all components at each level co-evolve. This framework will speed up the alignment in organizations. We argue that the lack of knowledge of business among IT people and IT knowledge among business executives may cause the gap; therefore, a need arises to have a knowledgeable mediator between the domains that could help in the co-evolution. A K-mediator (i.e. knowledge mediator) has been used in the proposed co-evolutionary framework that facilitates the co-evolution at each level. Finally the thesis presents a case study in financial domain in order to evaluate and validate the framework.

Business-IT alignment (BITA) continues to be a top management concern. It generally refers to a preferred condition in which the relationship between business and IT is optimised to maximise the business value of IT. Early approaches in both research and practice have focused on the role of IT in supporting business strategies. Today, a more extended approach of BITA has been embraced that recognises soft factors that are related to people and culture issues at both tactical and operational levels of organisations. ‘Why alignment is important’ is not the crucial question today. In fact ‘how it can be achieved and matured’ is the real concern of business executives. There exists a number of theoretical models for conceptualising BITA, however, they have different focuses and contain different BITA components. Therefore, there is a need for a means of supporting practitioners for selecting an appropriate model. Furthermore, there is a need for a more practice-oriented research that target higher maturity of BITA by understanding the organisational context, including barriers that hinders BITA and the mutual relationships between organisational culture and BITA. Thus, the overall problem addressed in the thesis is the following: In spite of extensive literature on business-IT alignment, there is still limited maturity of business-IT alignment in practice due to the limited knowledge on barriers that hinder BITA achievement from practitioners’ perspective, on the means for supporting the selection of an appropriate model for assessing BITA, and on mutual relationships between BITA and organisational culture. Based on this research problem, five research objectives were developed. The first two objectives corresponded to barriers to achieving BITA and supporting the selection of BITA model respectively. The remaining three objectives corresponded to the two unidirectional influences between BITA and organisational culture (OC) and to the mutual relationships between them respectively. Different research methodologies and strategies were applied to achieve the research objectives, including qualitative and quantitative studies as well as design science. The results presented in the thesis, each corresponding to an objective, are the following:  A list of barriers that practitioners can use as a basis for better achievement of BITA, a better focus on strategic vs. tactical barriers, and their relationships to BITA components. An evaluation framework that supports practitioners in selecting appropriate BITA models for assessing and modelling BITA. An extended version of the strategic alignment model (SAM) of Luftman (2000), which considers organisational culture. An analysis of the impact of BITA components on organisational culture profiles. A BITA-organisational culture integrated view that supports decision-makers in facilitating decisions regarding both BITA and organisational culture. The results of the research provide both theoretical and empirical contributions to the business-IT alignment research and practice. / MIT

Thesis (MAcc)--University of Stellenbosch, 2009.

In this thesis, eliciting system functional requirements based on business requirements during software intensive systems acquisition or development process is investigated and an approach is proposed for this purpose. Concepts and current problems within the framework of business requirements are investigated with a general literature review of requirements engineering and technology acquisition. Determination of requirements of IT system to be acquired according to the business objectives and base lining business processes is dealt with business process modeling. ARIS providing integrated and complete information system architecture along with modeling techniques and modeling tool is also investigated. Proposed approach recommends EEPC as process modeling technique and ARIS software as supporting toolset, and explains how to conduct application of automatic requirements eliciting from business process models, by extending a reporting script provided by ARIS software. Proposed approach was partially applied to the real project and the obtained results were presented in this thesis.

Information Technology (IT) systems are pervasive tools for contemporary enterprises to achieve their mission and goals. A key issue for a well-functioning enterprise is to keep business and IT strategies aligned as they continuously evolve. Although many practitioners and researchers offer business and IT alignment theories and approaches there is no silver bullet solution for all the issues involved in Strategic Business and IT Alignment (SBITA), which is still ranked amongst the five top enterprise executives? concerns year after year. In this thesis two SBITA assessment methods are presented. The first is the Organization-wide Approach for Assessing SBITA, developed as an enhancement of Jerry N. Luftman's SBITA assessment approach in terms of measurability, traceability and organizational involvement. The second is the Alignment Metamodel Assessment Method (AMAM). Both methods are based on well established references and approaches and they are presented with systematic documentation for their application and reusability as shown in the included papers and reported case studies. This is a composite thesis that, besides the introduction, includes five papers (papers A-E). Paper A describes Luftman's SBITA assessment approach and its enhancement in terms of measurability, traceability and organizational involvement, the proposed Organization-wide Approach for Assessing SBITA. Results from applying this approach in two case studies in companies in Sweden and Nicaragua are also included. Paper B describes the AMAM. It explains how a metamodel is deduced and how the SBITA assessment will be performed. This paper argues that the AMAM can be affiliated to the EA discipline as a guide or reference for identifying the relevant EA?s representations for the SBITA concern, mitigating the expenses and drawbacks of the often larger modeling required in applying EA frameworks. Paper C shows a weighting of the importance of the SBITA topics, taking as reference the Henderson & Venkatraman Strategic Alignment Model (SAM) - the basis of Luftman?s SBITA assessment approach -by relating it to the relevant and highly cited references in the field of SBITA. Paper D explains the criteria and the process for associating the AMAM artifacts with the Zachman´s Enterprise Architecture Framework and reports the pattern of association into the EA dominion. Paper E reports the details of the processes and results of applying the developed AMAM in a case study conducted in an intensive IT services enterprise in Nicaragua. / QC 20100805

The contribution of small firms towards the creation of economic value in a country’s Gross Domestic Product, employment and innovation is widely acknowledged. Relatively little is known on how small firms are adopting IT strategically to acheive business-IT alignment and how alignment changes over time. This study examines from a dynamic perspective IT adoption actions undertaken by owner-managers, in relation to business-IT alignment in small firms in the island state of Malta. To attain its research objectives, the methodological stance adopted in this research study is that of grounded theory. Moving away from a deductive approach, this study embraces a constructivist approach using a combination of inductive and abductive thought. No fewer than thirty-one in-depth interviews are conducted with owner-managers to observe alignment patterns of IT adoption behaviour in their respective small firms operating in Malta and employing up to 49 employees. Four business-IT alignment equilibrium states are identified, serving as markers to map out the common IT alignment paths that each firm pursued, not necessarily in linear form, during their operational years. A substantive model, which identifies four distinct IT alignment patterns, denotes each common path that a group of firms took in their movement from one alignment equilibrium state to another, throughout their life-cycle stages. This study has substantive application and comprises several implications for the development of IT adoption behaviour when small firms endeavour to strategically align business with IT. It provides policy-makers, academic researchers and small firms’ owner-managers with a theoretical framework that can provide them with factors that can predict the kind of alignment patterns that are likely to occur. Findings indicate that the quality of IT related technological solutions that are taken up by each small firm are reliant on the owner-manager’s characteristics that focus mainly on the knowledge of internal IT expertise and the project management capabilities to manage IT outsourcers. Given that few studies have been conducted to study and establish patterns of IT alignment in small firms, this research provides an important contribution to knowledge and to the existing academic literature.

<p>A number of attempts have been made to define strategic business and information technology (IT) alignment; several representations of what it is are available in academic and practitioners’ fields. The literature suggests that firms need to achieve strategic business and IT alignment to be competitive. Strategic business and IT alignment impact business performance and IT effectiveness. We propose a unified strategic business and IT alignment model based on four strategic business and IT alignment models: Strategic Alignment Model (SAM), Strategic Alignment Maturity Model (SAMM), information system strategic alignment model and an operational model of strategic alignment. I argue that such a unified model will provide a better understanding of the nature and key aspects of strategic business and IT alignment from different, and sometimes complementary, theories. The unified model represents the concepts and instruments used in these four strategic businesses and IT alignment models. Our principal research goal is to pave the way to develop a common understanding between the different models. The components of the unified strategic business and IT alignment model were ranked with a group of IT experts and business experts from four public universities in Nicaragua. The result can be used as a basis for improving strategic business and IT alignment.</p>

Organizations that have come to depend on legacy systems face quite a paradoxical problem. Maintaining the system might prove ineffective in accommodating necessary changes, but a system migration project is expensive and incurs a high amount of risk. Organizations are therefore hesitant to respond to the legacy system problem by undertaking action. Legacy system are often not causing their organization any problems at present, but a focus on the future with regard to the legacy system problem is lacking. This results in IT systems reaching an end-of-life state. The research therefore set out to explore a future-oriented perspective on legacy systems by means of observation, a literature review and a survey. The researcher found the key concept of a future-oriented perspective to be that any system that is limiting an organization to grow and innovate can be regarded as a legacy system. A framework to designate legacy status to IT systems is proposed in order to guide practitioners to acknowledge a problematic IT system to facilitate appropriate response at the right time. In relation to a future-oriented perspective, when to designate legacy status is best determined according to the system’s flexibility towards change and the alignment of the system with the business. In that regard, IT systems are end-of-life systems when they are too inflexible to change, and as a result become unaligned with either current operations or a future business opportunity or need.

La plupart des entreprises évoluent dans des marchés concurrentiels en adaptant rapidement leurs processus métiers. Leur performance dépend de leur capacité à utiliser des techniques d'amélioration continue de leur organisation par la mise au point de Systèmes Informatiques (SI) durables pour l'automatisation des processus. En ce sens, les architectures orientées services (Service Oriented Architectures) ont permis le développement de SI flexibles avec un style d'architecture prédominant de composition de services. Cependant, l'alignement de ces architectures aux impératifs de l'évolution des processus reste une préoccupation centrale. Dans cette thèse, nous étudions la cartographie et l'évolution des processus métiers depuis leur conception jusqu'à leur automatisation dans une architecture orientée services ainsi que son adaptation. Nous proposons une approche d'ingénierie dirigée par les modèles intégrée à un outil de modélisation de processus et de développement d'architectures orientées services. Celle-ci débute par la spécification d'un modèle BPMN (Business Process Modeling Notation) décrivant les interactions des processus métiers. Grâce à une chaîne de transformation automatisée, nous produisons un modèle SCA (Service Component Architecture) décrivant une solution de composition de services. Ceci garantit la traçabilité architecturale entre le niveau métier du SI et son niveau technique puisque les services générés décrivent une logique applicative qui met en oeuvre la logique métier du modèle BPMN. Ensuite, nous introduisons une méthode de propagation du changement de la logique métier vers la logique applicative qui est fondée sur la synchronisation incrémentale entre les modèles BPMN et SCA. Elle est intégrée à un outil d'analyse de l'impact du changement qui se base sur la réécriture de graphes pour éviter les inconsistances induites par les modifications. Enfin, elle permet de simuler l'impact des évolutions des processus, pour en estimer le coût selon les métriques que nous proposons, avant de procéder à la réingénierie de l'architecture orientée services pour assurer une meilleure gouvernance du changement / Most companies evolve in competitive markets by quickly adapting their business processes. Their performance depends on their capability to adopt continuous improvement techniques for their organization through the development of durable Information Systems (IS) for automating the processes. In this sense, Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA) enable the development of flexible IS with a predominant architectural paradigm of service compositions. However, aligning the SOA to the business processes evolutions remains an overriding concern. In this thesis, we study business process management and evolution from their design until their automation in SOA and their adaptation. We propose a model-driven engineering approach which is integrated to a tool for business process modeling and SOA development. It begins with the design of a model with Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) describing process interactions. With an automated transformation chain, we produce a model with Service-Component Architecture (SCA) describing service compositions solution based on a SOA. This ensures the architectural traceability between the business level of the IS and its technical level, since generated services describe an application logic that implements the BPMN model. Then, we introduce an incremental change propagation method between business process and SOA founded on BPMN and SCA models synchronization. It is integrated to a change impact simulation and analysis tool that is based on graph rewriting technique to avoid the inconsistencies caused by change propagation. Finally, we propose metrics for measuring the impact of business process evolutions on SOA maintenance and ensuring better change governance