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.
Chapter PDF
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Luftman, J., Maclean, E.R.: Key issues for IT executives. MIS Quarterly Executive 4(2), 89–104 (2004)
Reich, B.H., Nelson, K.M.: In Their Own Words: CIO Visions About the Future of In-House IT Organizations. The DATA BASE for Advances in ISs 34, 28–44 (2003)
Tallon, P.P., Kraemer, K.L.: Executives’ Perspectives on IT: Unraveling the Link between Business Strategy, Management Practices and IT Business Value. ACIS2002, USA (2002)
Watson, R.T., Kelly, G.G., Galliers, R.D., Brancheau, J.: Key issues in information systems management: an international perspective. Journal of Management ISs 13, 91–115 (1997)
Brancheau, J.C, Janz, B., Wetherbe, J.C.: Key issues in information systems management. 1994-95. SIM Delphi results. MIS Quarterly 20(2), 225–242 (1996)
Chan, Y.E., Huff, S.L., Copeland, D.G., Barclay, D.W.: Business Strategic Orientation, Information Systems Strategic Orientation and Strategic Alignment. Information Systems Research 8(2), 125–150 (1997)
Kefi, H., Kalika, M.: Survey of Strategic Alignment Impacts on Organizational Performance in Int. European Companies, Hawaii Int. Conf. on System Sciences (2005)
Chan, Y.E.: Why haven’t we mastered alignment? The importance of the informal organization structure, MIS Quarterly Executive 1, 97–112 (2002)
Croteau, A.M., Bergeron, F.: An information technology trilogy: business strategy, technological deployment and organizational performance. Journal of Strategic Information Systems 10, 77–99 (2001)
Luftman, J.: Assessing Business-IT Alignment Maturity. Communications of the Association for Information Systems 4(14), 1–50 (2000)
Yu, E.: Agent Orientation as a Modelling Paradigm. Wirtschaftsinformatik 43(2) (2001)
Van Lamsweerde, A.: Goal-Oriented Requirements Engineering: A Guided Tour, Invited Paper, Int. Symposium on Requirements Engineering (RE), pp. 249–263 Toronto, Canada (2001)
Rolland, C., Salinesi, C.: Modeling Goals and Reasoning with Them, Engineering and Managing Software Requirements (EMSR), Aurum, A., Wohlin, C. Springer Verlag (2005)
Bensaou, M.: Seven-Eleven Japan: Managing a Networked Organization, INSEAD EuroAsia Centre, Case Study (1997)
Bleistein, S., Aurum, A., Cox, K., Ray, P.: Strategy-Oriented Alignment in Requirements Engineering: Linking Business Strategy to Requirements of e-Business Systems using the SOARE approach. Journal of Research and Practice in IT 36, 259–276 (2004)
Bleistein, S., Cox, K., Verner, J., Phalp, K.: B-SCP: a requirements analysis framework for validating strategic alignment of organisational IT based on strategy, context and process. Information and Software Technology 46, 846–868 (2006)
Rolland, C., Prakash, N.: Matching ERP System Functionality to Customer Requirements. RE01, Canada, pp. 66–75 (2001)
Yu, E.: Towards Modelling and Reasoning Support for Early-Phase Requirements Engineering. RE97 Washington D.C., USA pp. 226–235 (1997)
Rolland, C., Souveyet, C., Ben Achour, C.: Guiding goal modelling using scenarios. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering vol. 24(12) (1998)
Dardenne, A., Lamsweerde, A., Fickas, S.: Goal-directed Requirements Acquisition. Science of Computer Programming 20, 3–50 (1993)
Henderson, J.C., Venkatraman, N.: Strategic alignment: Leveraging information technology for transforming organizations. IBM Systems Journal 32(1), 4–16 (1993)
Luftman, J.N.: Competing in the Information Age. Oxford University Press, Oxford (1996)
Maes, R.: A Generic Framework for Information Management. Prime Vera Working Paper, Universiteit Van Amsterdam (1999)
Goedvolk, H., van Schijndel, A., van Swede, V., Tolido, R.: The Design, Development and Deployment of ICT Systems in the 21st Century: Integrated Architecture Framework (IAF). Cap Gemini Ernst and Young (2000)
Aerts, A.T.M., Goossenaerts, J.B.M., Hammer, D.K., Wortmann, J.C.: Architectures in context: On the evolution of business, application software, and ICT platform architectures. Information and Management 41(6), 781–794 (2004)
Wieringa, R.J., Blanken, H.M., Fokkinga, M.M., Grefen, P.W.P.J.: Aligning application architecture to the business context. In: Eder, J., Missikoff, M. (eds.) CAiSE 2003. LNCS, vol. 2681, pp. 209–225. Springer, Heidelberg (2003)
Bodhuin, T., Esposito, R., Pacelli, C., Tortorella, M.: Impact Analysis for Supporting the Co-Evolution of Business Processes and Supporting Software Systems. BPMDS04, Latvia (2004)
Arsanjani, A., Alpigini, J.: Using Grammar-oriented Object Design to Seamlessly Map Business Models to Component-based Software Architectures. Int. Symposium of Modelling and Simulation, USA, pp.186–191 (2001)
Giaglis, G.M.: On the Integrated Design and Evaluation of Business Processes and Information Systems. Communications of the AIS, vol. 2(5) (July 1999)
Kardasis, P., Loucopoulos, P.: Aligning Legacy Information Systems to Business Processes. In: Pernici, B., Thanos, C. (eds.) CAiSE 1998. LNCS, vol. 1413, pp. 25–40. Springer, Heidelberg (1998)
Salinesi, C., Rolland, C.: Fitting Business Models to Systems Functionality Exploring the Fitness Relationship. In: Eder, J., Missikoff, M. (eds.) CAiSE 2003. LNCS, vol. 2681, Springer, Heidelberg (2003)
Zachman, J.A.: A framework for Information Systems architecture. IBM Systems Journal 26(3), 276–292 (1987)
Longépé, C.: The Enterprise Architecture IT Project: The Urbanisation Paradigm. Elsevier Health Sciences, New York (2005)
Etien, A., Rolland, C.: A Process for Generating Fitness Measures, CAISE05. In: Pastor, Ó., Falcão e Cunha, J. (eds.) CAiSE 2005. LNCS, vol. 3520, pp. 277–292. Springer, Heidelberg (2005)
Wegmann, A., Regev, R., Loison, B.: Business and IT Alignment with SEAM, REBNITA, RE05, France (2005)
Soffer, P.: Fit Measurement: How to Distinguish Between Fit and Misfit, note for BPMDS’04, Latvia (2004)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2007 Springer Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Thevenet, LH., Salinesi, C. (2007). Aligning IS to Organization’s Strategy: The InStAl Method. In: Krogstie, J., Opdahl, A., Sindre, G. (eds) Advanced Information Systems Engineering. CAiSE 2007. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 4495. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-72988-4_15
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-72988-4_15
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-72987-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-72988-4
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)