Modeling Strategic Alignment Using INSTAL

Strategic alignment has emerged as a usual term over the last decades and is now widely used. Yet the definitions available are often vague and lack of formalism to support a systematic reasoning. One difficulty is to deal with high level organization objectives, which are complex by nature, rather informal and cross-cutting. This article presents parts of an Information System (IS) engineering method, called INSTAL, that guides the process of eliciting IS evolution requirements by analysing strategic alignment models. This paper focuses on the upper part of this process that consists in constructing these models. The INSTAL approach is original since it relies on a meta-model that defines alignment formally and it guides the construction of strategic alignment models with complementary techniques. The paper presents these features and their application onto a real case drawn of a French banking company.