Aligning IS to Organization’s Strategy: The InStAl Method

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.

Process Mining Versus Intention Mining

“…Among them, we can mention ProM [26], CPN tools [24], EMiT [27], Disco [28]. The ProM framework is a pluggable framework that supports various plugins for different techniques of process mining such as α-algorithm and its extensions.…”

Strategic Alignment of Business Processes

“…Existing frameworks in the requirements engineering and service oriented architecutre space (E3 [5], Instal [190], GOORE [186]) attempt to provide attention to the problem of evaluating and maintaining alignment. Though these frameworks do not provide generalised systems that are applicable to a wide variety of organisations.…”

“…al. [190][191][192] , the strategy of the organisation is represented in terms of strategic objectives and strategic goals with respect to the vision of the organisation's stakeholder. Each strategy is modeling using a goal-map "A map is an oriented graph where nodes are goals (or intentions) and edges are strategies."…”

Towards a Unified Business Strategy Language: A Meta-model of Strategy Maps

“…The INSTAL method proposes a map-type to represent strategic intents and complementary process formalisms for business processes, integrated in a single meta-model [17]. Similarly, [18] puts forward a map-driven process modeling approach based on intentions and strategies capable of abstracting organizational goals and their achievement from detailed business processes.…”