A METHOD TO ENHANCE EXISTING BUSINESS-IT ALIGNMENT APPROACHES

M De Vries
2013 South African Journal of Industrial Engineering  
Enterprise engineering has recently emerged as a new discipline to address the intensified complexity and dynamics of the evolving enterprise by designing, aligning, and governing its development. Enterprise designers employ various approaches, frameworks, and methodologies to design and align various components in the enterprise. This paper takes a closer look at alignment between the business and IT components of an enterprise, and the need for a theoretical backing when combining multiple
more » ... roaches during enterprise design. The main contribution of this paper is the development of a 'method artefact'. The method artefact applies an existing model, called the business-IT alignment model, and is useful to enterprise designers when they need to enhance an existing business-IT alignment approach. As an additional contribution, the paper emphasises the role of an emerging research methodology, called 'design research', in developing the new method artefact. The paper demonstrates the use of the method artefact by enhancing the 'foundation for execution' approach with an element from the 'essence of operation' approach, and concludes with opportunities for further research. Enterprise engineering (EE) emerged as a new discipline to address the intensified complexity and dynamics of the evolving enterprise by designing, aligning, and governing its development. EE consists of three subfields: enterprise ontology, enterprise governance, and enterprise architecture [3] . One of the potential business benefits of EE is to design and align the entire enterprise [4]. However, a strong theme within enterprise design and alignment is alignment between business components and IT components, called 'business-IT alignment'. Although a proliferation of frameworks emerged in the literature to facilitate business-IT alignment [5], a study by Lindström et al. [6] indicates that existing theoretical frameworks fail to address the main concerns of the chief information officer. And a study performed by OVUM [7] indicates that 66 per cent of enterprises had developed their own customised framework, with one third of the participants making use of two or more theoretical frameworks. Yet, when practitioners combine elements from various alignment approaches/methodologies/frameworks, there is a lack of theoretical backing for these combinations [8, 9] . Business-IT alignment knowledge is embedded in an expanding number of alignment approaches and frameworks, each with its own alignment intent, scope, and means for alignment. This variety impairs comparison of the different approaches and possible combined use. Previous work circumvented this problem by providing a common reference model -the business-IT alignment model (BIAM) [10, 11] -for understanding and comparing existing alignment approaches. Although useful for comparison purposes, BIAM is a descriptive model. Prescriptive knowledge for applying BIAM in comparing and combining existing business-IT alignment approaches is absent.
doi:10.7166/24-2-609 fatcat:erdwwtro3vczrp37wq7uyxoify