Enterprise architectures for model-based Business-IT alignment

Nowadays, an enterprise must be able to rapidly modify its strategy, its business model, its organization, its business processes and its supporting ICT systems in order to adapt to its changing environment. All these changes must be kept as coherent as possible with each other. We envisage the use of a model-based approach as a solution to this problem in which mechanisms are used to ensure alignment among various models of the enterprise (and in particular between business models, business process models and IT models. This requires concepts and tools to allow the definition of alignment requirements among different modelling languages.
Problems related to alignment include:
- the use of different languages for the similar models;
- existence of not explicitly related models expressed in different languages rendering propagation of change in one model to another model difficult;
- enterprises design models containing redundant information;
- the absence of certainty that all the information required has been represented in models.

The main goal of the thesis is to create a method that could help the creation of a customized enterprise architecture. This architecture will be composed of modelling languages selected in specific categories. The main goals of the framework are to help to ensure that the required information is present in models and to facilitate the alignment between the chosen modelling languages. The big steps to succeed are to formalize a method to classify modelling languages, to effectively classify some modelling languages, to study the links between these modelling languages, and to validate the approach on case studies.