Experimenting a Modeling Approach for Designing Organization’s Strategies in the Context of Strategic Alignment Return to Published Papers

Aligning information systems (IS) to businesses has recently become a top-level concern in organizations. Several activities can be undertaken to deal with strategic alignment: elaboration of key indicators, target definition, monitoring, analysis, impact propagation etc. Working on strategic alignment, or correspondence between business and IS, requires to represent and document these two elements. Indeed, documenting strategy is necessary to evaluate the IS ability to satisfy the fundamental requirements of organizations. Different works have demonstrated that evaluating, documenting and analyzing IS alignment calls for modeling the elements to align. In the context of strategic alignment, the problem is that there are very few modeling techniques available to document organizations’ strategic objectives with the level of formality needed to achieve this task. Within these few, even fewer are compatible with the ones used to define IS functionalities. This paper explores the usability of a goal modeling technique, already used in IS engineering, to model organization’s strategy and to facilitate strategic alignment analysis. An application example is given, based on the well-known Seven Eleven Japan case study.