Strategic Business-IT alignment : a model-based approach

Nowadays IT plays a major role in many companies, whatever their size. This role traditionaly includes providing support for some repetitive and routine functions of the company to improve their efficiency or cost effectiveness. But more and more, IT is also percieved as an enabler for inovation in the business strategy and model (making e.g. possible new ways of delivering services or products, creating new products, or adding digital services to existing products, to name a few). An IT strategy (describing e.g. plans and objective relative to IT capacity development or outsourcing) therefore becomes an important element of the global company strategy and complements the business strategy. However, these two strategies are often defined separately by different managers (typically a board of directors and a CIO) and the coherence among them is not garanteed.

This project aims at studying how a model-based approach can help to improve the alignment between a business and an IT strategy. The project will study:
- existing ontologies and concepts for describing a business strategy and business model;
- existing ontologies and concepts for describing an IT strategy;
- how existing goal models can be used to model certain aspects of the business and IT strategy;
- how can the degree of alignment of the business and IT strategies can be described, evaluated and improved through establishment and analysis of links existing between the business and IT strategy.