A method to support the alignment of business models and goal models

Abstract

The activity of modelling has become a substantial mean to produce models used by managers to take important decisions regarding the organization. Usually, a business model is closely linked to the achievement of the organization’s goals. These goals can be expressed in a goal model. Most of the time, changes in the environment will lead to a redefinition of the goal model which will also modify the business model.
This thesis relates to the issue of the alignment between goal models and business models during the (re)definition of business and its environment. For solving this issue, a method that builds on a previous templates and rules approach from [4] is proposed. The goal of this approach is to reflect the new strategic changes from a goal model to an associated business model. The method takes as input a goal model and a business model, and outputs a business model that is aligned with the explicit goals of a business actor.
The results are an improvement of the previous templates and rules syntax (while keeping the original semantic), a better methodological support for the goal and business modelers and a decrease of implicit constructions for the production of the output. All of these improvements contribute to reduce the possible mistakes and ambiguities during the application of the method, and add more precision to the model produced in output. The validity of the results is illustrated by applying the improved method on a case study.

Date of Award	2008
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Namur
Supervisor	Michael Petit (Supervisor)