Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
the business services to the enterprise to achieve their business goals, 2) the optimum
“performance versus cost” of the IT capabilities to complement the value added busi-
ness services. Therefore, a sensible alignment strategy between business and IT is
essential to help organisations improve their financial efficiency particularly towards
their IT investments. Organisations require a mechanism that can provide the map-
ping of the current business service with the “best fit” IT capabilities. They also need
to be able to provide recommendations for the future IT strategy to assist in decision
making for their IT investments, which inevitably improve the business service and IT
applications alignment. However, before any alignment activities can be performed, a
set of comprehensive and accurate requirements are needed to form a solid foundation
to ensure well aligned business and IT. Business and technology consultants are
facing challenges in articulating what IT applications are currently used for adding
business value in an organisation. It is also difficult for consultants to recommend
the future of those IT applications in relation to effective computing resources in the
organisation. There are a number of factors contributing to these difficulties, 1) busi-
ness environments have become complex and IT applications are deeply integrated
with the business operations; 2) various IT applications serve different users for dif-
ferent purposes in their work; and 3) The socio-technical phenomenon impacts on
business behavior towards IT applications. IT applications also add different benefits
to the business performance and these benefits or values are normally perceived dif-
ferently from a cultural perspective [8],[9]. Such multiple dimensional aspects can be
described by complex business-IT alignment requirements which need to be captured
by consultants. Well gathered and represented requirements enable the production of
better analysis results for the current state of the business and IT alignment. It also
helps the organisation in setting the future direction of the organisation to achieve
their ultimate aims and objectives. Therefore, having the right requirements will
ensure that the organisation will have the correct knowledge to establish a better
alignment between their business and IT aspects [10],[11].
The Business-Technology Alignment Consulting Framework, therefore, has been
developed to facilitate the analysis of business-IT alignment requirements in organisa-
tions. This framework enables consultants to establish a holistic view of the business
situation and the IT applications supporting the business. The framework first defines
whether a business operation is a core or supporting service. It then identifies and pri-
oritises the future of the IT applications based on their support of these services and
recommends, depending on the business service that the IT supports, if an IT applica-
tion should be developed/upgraded with new functions to adequately serve a wider
range of business operations, or be outsourced to reduce unnecessary incurred cost to
the business. The framework techniques are developed and implemented in a consult-
ing CASE tool. The paper is structured as follows; Section 2 discusses the issues of
business and IT alignment vs. socio-technical aspects of Information Systems. This
section also discusses the complexity of eliciting informal requirements to establish the
business and IT alignment. Section 3 describes the adoption of an Organisational
Semiotics approach in the consulting framework design to support this. Section 4 de-
scribes the Business-Technology Alignment Consulting Framework and three of its
techniques, Business Service Analysis, Business Norms and Business Service Valua-
tion for modeling the business landscape through articulating the cultural aspects in an
organisation into an explicit form that reflects the business and IT alignment require-
ments and level. Section 5 draws conclusions and suggests future work.
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