Validating Adequacy and Suitability of Business-IT Alignment Criteria in an Inter-Enterprise Maturity Model 202

Abstract

Aligning requirements of a business with its information technology is currently a major issue in enterprise computing. Existing literature indicates important criteria to judge the level of alignment between business and IT within a single enterprise. However, identifying such criteria in an inter-enterprise setting-or rethinking the existing onesis hardly addressed at all. Business-IT alignment in such settings poses new challenges, as in inter-enterprise collaborations, alignment is driven by economic processes instead of centralized decision-making processes. In our research, we develop a maturity model for business-IT alignment in inter-enterprise settings that takes this difference into account. In this paper, we report on a multi-method approach we devised to confront the validation of the business-IT alignment criteria that we included in the maturity model. As independent feedback is critical for our validation, we used a focus group session and a case study as instruments to take the first step in validating the business-IT alignment criteria. We present how we applied our approach, what we learnt, and what the implications were for our model. * Supported by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) under contract number 638.003.407 (Value-Based Business-IT Alignment).

Converging on business-it alignment best practices: Lessons learned from a dutch cross-governmental partnership

“…However, that research has also found some similarities between the two sectors. Moreover, we have also found evidence, in the case studies we have conducted to design the ICoNOs MM (Santana Tapia et al, 2007;Santana Tapia et al, 2008a;Santana Tapia et al, 2008b), which confirms some similarities. We do believe that CNOs in both sectors begin a BITa project with a solid mission statement that drives the processes to meet the shared goals.…”

On Creating Industry-Wide Reference Architectures

“…On the other hand, it has been argued that software cities should not be "designed" in the traditional way, but rather "planned" and "regulated" similarly to urban planning. Business-IT alignment is also an active research area, but only a few works [25,26] study its extension with a focus on inter-enterprise and complex environments. However, they do not provide general conclusions.…”

“…5) Research of ultra-large-scale systems is important for next-generation enterprise computing. We find some of the software engineering and enterprise computing techniques [9,20,26] invaluable in creating reference architectures. However, others are not designed with the industry-wide scale in mind.…”

Assessing business-IT alignment in networked organizations

“…Our previous work [273] helped us to develop such codification based on the domains included in our ICoNOs MM, i.e., partnering structure, IS architecture, process architecture, coordination and cost management. This codification was later used in the analysis of the interviews transcripts.…”

“…The final B-ITa domains are presented in Chapter 6 after using three other case studies for generalization of findings. A preliminary version of this chapter has been published in the proceedings of the 11th IEEE International EDOC Enterprise Computing Conference [273].…”