Fostering the Business Process Management-based Strategic Alignment between Business and IT in organizations

Abstract

Business Process Management (BPM) can support organizations in achieving strategic alignment between business and IT. However, BPM approaches should address not only functional properties, but also non-functional properties. Considering such a need, the StrAli-BPM (Strategic Alignment with BPM) approach has been proposed aiming to fill a still existing gap in BPM approaches in terms of non-functional properties between the modeling of business processes and its subsequent implementation and enactment through SOC. StrAli-BPM uses the concept of Business Level Agreement (BLA), inspired by the concept of Service Level Agreement (SLA). This research project aims at moving towards the definition of a framework for StrAli-BPM, extending it so that it covers other important points to the context in which it is falls, such as: (i) definition of BLAS based on organizational goals; (ii) semi-automatic mapping of BLAS for SLAs through heuristics; and, (iii) monitoring of BLAs and SLAs execution. Moreover, this project aims at carrying out experiments that can validate the benefits of BPM-StrAli through a systematic analysis of its advantages and disadvantages. (AU)