CAiSE 2007: Advanced Information Systems Engineering pp 203-217 | Cite as
Aligning IS to Organization’s Strategy: The InStAl Method
Conference paper
Abstract
Aligning Information Systems (IS) to organization’s strategic business objectives is one of organizations’ top preoccupations. Misalignment is considered as a reason of IT’s failure to improve organizational performance. If strategic alignment is relatively simple to understand, it is not so easy to implement. Our experience showed us that organizations are not really able to systematically evaluate whether there is alignment, mainly because of the lack of documentation on strategic alignment. This paper intends to deal with this issue by proposing an approach to describe organizations’ strategic objectives and its IS, in order to document and analyze strategic alignment, i.e. how the IS contributes to strategic objectives satisfaction. The proposed method, called InStAl (Intentional Strategic Alignment), reuses organization documents as a basis to formalize strategic alignment. InStAl was created following the principles of an action research approach, which consists in developing the approach while exploring issues raised by the case study.
Keywords
Alignment Strategic Alignment Documentation Organization strategy Requirements EngineeringPreview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
- 1.Luftman, J., Maclean, E.R.: Key issues for IT executives. MIS Quarterly Executive 4(2), 89–104 (2004)Google Scholar
- 2.Reich, B.H., Nelson, K.M.: In Their Own Words: CIO Visions About the Future of In-House IT Organizations. The DATA BASE for Advances in ISs 34, 28–44 (2003)Google Scholar
- 3.Tallon, P.P., Kraemer, K.L.: Executives’ Perspectives on IT: Unraveling the Link between Business Strategy, Management Practices and IT Business Value. ACIS2002, USA (2002)Google Scholar
- 4.Watson, R.T., Kelly, G.G., Galliers, R.D., Brancheau, J.: Key issues in information systems management: an international perspective. Journal of Management ISs 13, 91–115 (1997)Google Scholar
- 5.Brancheau, J.C, Janz, B., Wetherbe, J.C.: Key issues in information systems management. 1994-95. SIM Delphi results. MIS Quarterly 20(2), 225–242 (1996)Google Scholar
- 6.Chan, Y.E., Huff, S.L., Copeland, D.G., Barclay, D.W.: Business Strategic Orientation, Information Systems Strategic Orientation and Strategic Alignment. Information Systems Research 8(2), 125–150 (1997)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
- 7.Kefi, H., Kalika, M.: Survey of Strategic Alignment Impacts on Organizational Performance in Int. European Companies, Hawaii Int. Conf. on System Sciences (2005)Google Scholar
- 8.Chan, Y.E.: Why haven’t we mastered alignment? The importance of the informal organization structure, MIS Quarterly Executive 1, 97–112 (2002)Google Scholar
- 9.Croteau, A.M., Bergeron, F.: An information technology trilogy: business strategy, technological deployment and organizational performance. Journal of Strategic Information Systems 10, 77–99 (2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
- 10.Luftman, J.: Assessing Business-IT Alignment Maturity. Communications of the Association for Information Systems 4(14), 1–50 (2000)Google Scholar
- 11.Yu, E.: Agent Orientation as a Modelling Paradigm. Wirtschaftsinformatik 43(2) (2001)Google Scholar
- 12.Van Lamsweerde, A.: Goal-Oriented Requirements Engineering: A Guided Tour, Invited Paper, Int. Symposium on Requirements Engineering (RE), pp. 249–263 Toronto, Canada (2001)Google Scholar
- 13.Rolland, C., Salinesi, C.: Modeling Goals and Reasoning with Them, Engineering and Managing Software Requirements (EMSR), Aurum, A., Wohlin, C. Springer Verlag (2005)Google Scholar
- 14.Bensaou, M.: Seven-Eleven Japan: Managing a Networked Organization, INSEAD EuroAsia Centre, Case Study (1997)Google Scholar
- 15.Bleistein, S., Aurum, A., Cox, K., Ray, P.: Strategy-Oriented Alignment in Requirements Engineering: Linking Business Strategy to Requirements of e-Business Systems using the SOARE approach. Journal of Research and Practice in IT 36, 259–276 (2004)Google Scholar
- 16.Bleistein, S., Cox, K., Verner, J., Phalp, K.: B-SCP: a requirements analysis framework for validating strategic alignment of organisational IT based on strategy, context and process. Information and Software Technology 46, 846–868 (2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
- 17.Rolland, C., Prakash, N.: Matching ERP System Functionality to Customer Requirements. RE01, Canada, pp. 66–75 (2001)Google Scholar
- 18.Yu, E.: Towards Modelling and Reasoning Support for Early-Phase Requirements Engineering. RE97 Washington D.C., USA pp. 226–235 (1997)Google Scholar
- 19.Rolland, C., Souveyet, C., Ben Achour, C.: Guiding goal modelling using scenarios. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering vol. 24(12) (1998)Google Scholar
- 20.Dardenne, A., Lamsweerde, A., Fickas, S.: Goal-directed Requirements Acquisition. Science of Computer Programming 20, 3–50 (1993)MATHCrossRefGoogle Scholar
- 21.Henderson, J.C., Venkatraman, N.: Strategic alignment: Leveraging information technology for transforming organizations. IBM Systems Journal 32(1), 4–16 (1993)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
- 22.Luftman, J.N.: Competing in the Information Age. Oxford University Press, Oxford (1996)Google Scholar
- 23.Maes, R.: A Generic Framework for Information Management. Prime Vera Working Paper, Universiteit Van Amsterdam (1999)Google Scholar
- 24.Goedvolk, H., van Schijndel, A., van Swede, V., Tolido, R.: The Design, Development and Deployment of ICT Systems in the 21st Century: Integrated Architecture Framework (IAF). Cap Gemini Ernst and Young (2000)Google Scholar
- 25.Aerts, A.T.M., Goossenaerts, J.B.M., Hammer, D.K., Wortmann, J.C.: Architectures in context: On the evolution of business, application software, and ICT platform architectures. Information and Management 41(6), 781–794 (2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
- 26.Wieringa, R.J., Blanken, H.M., Fokkinga, M.M., Grefen, P.W.P.J.: Aligning application architecture to the business context. In: Eder, J., Missikoff, M. (eds.) CAiSE 2003. LNCS, vol. 2681, pp. 209–225. Springer, Heidelberg (2003)Google Scholar
- 27.Bodhuin, T., Esposito, R., Pacelli, C., Tortorella, M.: Impact Analysis for Supporting the Co-Evolution of Business Processes and Supporting Software Systems. BPMDS04, Latvia (2004)Google Scholar
- 28.Arsanjani, A., Alpigini, J.: Using Grammar-oriented Object Design to Seamlessly Map Business Models to Component-based Software Architectures. Int. Symposium of Modelling and Simulation, USA, pp.186–191 (2001)Google Scholar
- 29.Giaglis, G.M.: On the Integrated Design and Evaluation of Business Processes and Information Systems. Communications of the AIS, vol. 2(5) (July 1999)Google Scholar
- 30.Kardasis, P., Loucopoulos, P.: Aligning Legacy Information Systems to Business Processes. In: Pernici, B., Thanos, C. (eds.) CAiSE 1998. LNCS, vol. 1413, pp. 25–40. Springer, Heidelberg (1998)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
- 31.Salinesi, C., Rolland, C.: Fitting Business Models to Systems Functionality Exploring the Fitness Relationship. In: Eder, J., Missikoff, M. (eds.) CAiSE 2003. LNCS, vol. 2681, Springer, Heidelberg (2003)Google Scholar
- 32.Zachman, J.A.: A framework for Information Systems architecture. IBM Systems Journal 26(3), 276–292 (1987)Google Scholar
- 33.Longépé, C.: The Enterprise Architecture IT Project: The Urbanisation Paradigm. Elsevier Health Sciences, New York (2005)Google Scholar
- 34.Etien, A., Rolland, C.: A Process for Generating Fitness Measures, CAISE05. In: Pastor, Ó., Falcão e Cunha, J. (eds.) CAiSE 2005. LNCS, vol. 3520, pp. 277–292. Springer, Heidelberg (2005)Google Scholar
- 35.Wegmann, A., Regev, R., Loison, B.: Business and IT Alignment with SEAM, REBNITA, RE05, France (2005)Google Scholar
- 36.Soffer, P.: Fit Measurement: How to Distinguish Between Fit and Misfit, note for BPMDS’04, Latvia (2004)Google Scholar
Copyright information
© Springer Berlin Heidelberg 2007