A Return on Our Experience of Using Services as a Unifying Concept for Business and IT Alignment in a University

Abstract

We describe the use of the concept of service for aligning the business activities of an organization and its IT resources. This work is set in the context of a longitudinal action-research project between our research unit and our university's IT department. We use one concrete and real example to illustrate the many projects we worked on. The research outcomes of this collaboration are two business/IT alignment and architecture recommendations that are relevant for practitioners.