Experimenting a Modeling Approach for Designing Organization's Strategies in the Context of Strategic Alignment

National audienceAligning information systems (IS) to businesses hasrecently become a top-level concern in organizations.Several activities can be undertaken to deal withstrategic alignment: elaboration of key indicators,target definition, monitoring, analysis, impactpropagation etc. Working on strategic alignment, orcorrespondence between business and IS, requires torepresent and document these two elements. Indeed,documenting strategy is necessary to evaluate the ISability to satisfy the fundamental requirements oforganizations. Different works have demonstrated thatevaluating, documenting and analyzing IS alignmentcalls for modeling the elements to align. In the contextof strategic alignment, the problem is that there arevery few modeling techniques available to documentorganizations' strategic objectives with the level offormality needed to achieve this task. Within these few,even fewer are compatible with the ones used to defineIS functionalities. This paper explores the usability ofa goal modeling technique, already used in ISengineering, to model organization's strategy and tofacilitate strategic alignment analysis. An applicationexample is given, based on the well-known SevenEleven Japan case study

Experimenting a Modeling Approach for Designing Organization's Strategies in the Context of Strategic Alignment

National audienceAligning information systems (IS) to businesses hasrecently become a top-level concern in organizations.Several activities can be undertaken to deal withstrategic alignment: elaboration of key indicators,target definition, monitoring, analysis, impactpropagation etc. Working on strategic alignment, orcorrespondence between business and IS, requires torepresent and document these two elements. Indeed,documenting strategy is necessary to evaluate the ISability to satisfy the fundamental requirements oforganizations. Different works have demonstrated thatevaluating, documenting and analyzing IS alignmentcalls for modeling the elements to align. In the contextof strategic alignment, the problem is that there arevery few modeling techniques available to documentorganizations' strategic objectives with the level offormality needed to achieve this task. Within these few,even fewer are compatible with the ones used to defineIS functionalities. This paper explores the usability ofa goal modeling technique, already used in ISengineering, to model organization's strategy and tofacilitate strategic alignment analysis. An applicationexample is given, based on the well-known SevenEleven Japan case study