Aligning Corporate and IT Goals and Strategies in the Oil and Gas Industry

Abstract

Abstract.Companies increasingly recognize that IT plays a significant role in their current and future business strategies, and IT departments increasingly need to justify their role in terms of contributions to business goals. Currently, little experience exists on how to effectively create this missing business-IT link. In 2010, ECOPETROL, a global player in the oil and gas industry, launched an initiative to align their IT activities with their overall business goals. IT is becoming a key information provider for making business-oriented decisions and achieving business success. Consequently, the view of IT is from that of a support organization to that of a value-creating information provider. This article describes how ECOPETROL is utilizing IT services to improve their competitiveness in the marketplace. They are applying the GQM + Strategies ® approach for measurement-based IT-business alignment.

Integration of Balanced Scorecard (BSC), Strategy Map, and Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process (FAHP) for a Sustainability Business Framework: A Case Study of a Spanish Software Factory in the Financial Sector

“…Strategy maps provide a visual framework that has been developed by companies in virtually all areas. In relation to this article, it is necessary to highlight the following proposals about the application of the BSC and the strategy maps in the financial sector [28,29], in the software development sector [30,31], in IT departments or companies [22,32,33] and other proposals related to business and corporate sustainability [24,34]. These studies are some examples about the application of strategy maps for linking measurements with business aims.…”

Exhaustive and Efficient Identification of Rationales Using GQM+Strategies with Stakeholder Relationship Analysis

“…Collecting data to measure the success or failure of goals and strategies is especially difficult when developers do not know which data are necessary [14]. GQM assists developers by creating software-related goals, generating questions to refine goals, and specifying measures that must be considered to answer the generated questions [8].…”

“…Furthermore, through the GQM paradigm, whether goals at each level are achieved can be evaluated. Our approach uses the following terminology (based on Basili et al [8], [16]):…”

“…5). GQM+Strategies is based on Basili et al [8], [16]. The CAM has two uses; one is to extract missing rationales in the definition process (Step 2, 3, 4), and the other is to check rationales in the revision process (Step 9).…”

“…One approach to resolve this issue is GQM+Strategies R [5], [6], which aligns and assesses the business goals at each level to the overall strategies and goals of the organization * * . Many companies worldwide (e.g., the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency [7], the global oil and gas industry [8], and non-software development domains such as the military training domain [9]) have applied GQM+Strategies for measurement-based IT-business alignment.…”