On exposing strategic and structural mismatches between business and information systems: misalignment symptom detection based on enterprise architecture model analysis

Abstract

One of the most important issues on information systems (IS) research is the need to align business with information systems and information technology (IT). Since information systems facilitate the success of business strategies, the importance of business-IT (or strategic) alignment is unquestionable. While organisations address alignment achievement, they are continually suffering from misalignments. These difficulties (the misalignments) encumber the achievement of alignment and lead us to the phenomenon of misalignment. This Ph.D. dissertation deals with the concept of misalignment, with special attention on enterprise architecture (EA)-based analytical potential. In the following study, the problem of business-IT alignment will be translated into the aspects and concepts of enterprise architecture. The main purpose of the proposed research is to analyse strategic misalignment between the business dimension and the information systems dimension. In this Ph.D. dissertation, an analytical solution will be built to approach the topic of strategic alignment from an EA-based perspective. The study aims to accomplish an EA-based, systematic analysis of mismatches between business and information systems. The operation, the correctness, as well as the relevance of the framework will be validated via a case study. The contribution of the proposed study lies in connecting typical misalignment symptoms to relevant EA analysis types along traditional alignment perspectives. The significance of the proposed research is the clear and accurate compound of research methods and implementation instruments to approach EA-based misalignment symptom detection. The results of the proposed research will contribute to alignment assessment by expanding the ways of addressing alignment problems. The proposed research framework has the potential to extend our understanding on assessing the state of misalignment in a complex EA model structure.

Resource allocation approach to associate business-IT alignment to enterprise architecture design

“…Saat et al presented a meta-model method (a high-level abstraction of architecture contents) by considering tangible qualities of IT systems, business, and IT governance [21]. Malta and Sousa discussed that BITA should be achieved and maintained in an efficient and sustainable way [26].Öri deemed IT governance as a part of BITA measurement and mapped it to the EA metamodel [27,28]. The above five studies examined IT governance from a descriptive perspective.…”