B-SCP : an integrated approach for validating alignment of organizational IT requirements with competitive business strategy

Strategic alignment of IT exists when a business organization's goals and processes are inharmony with the IT software and systems that support them. Evidence shows that effectivestrategic alignment leads to superior financial performance of companies. Hence, CIOs and ITexecutives consistently rank alignment of IT with business strategy as a top priority innumerous surveys. Despite its importance to industry, strategic alignment has largely beenignored by requirements engineering research.The objective of the research presented in this thesis is to develop and test B-SCP, arequirements engineering analytical framework to help ensure that system requirements oforganizational IT are in alignment with and provide support for competitive business strategy.B-SCP combines requirements engineering methods for formalizing and reasoning aboutsoftware with analytical frameworks for competitive business strategy. Goal modeling, problemdiagrams, and business process modeling, techniques typically used in isolation in requirementsengineering, are integrated in a coherent framework. VMOST analysis, a management tool fororganizational alignment, is used to elicit business strategy from executives. The Business RulesGroup's Model for Organizational Motivation is used to provide guidance for constructing agoal model to represent business strategy. A business modeling framework proposed inmanagement research on e-business systems, is used to define the boundaries of scope for theorganizational IT requirements problem.B-SCP is evaluated and validated by two worked examples using data on completed, strategicIT projects of significant scale and complexity, occurring in different industrial applicationdomains. The second worked example includes evaluation based on expert feedback from amajor, IT executive stakeholder in the original project.This research concludes that B-SCP provides a credible solution to the industrial problem ofvalidating organizational IT requirements against business strategy. This thesis makes asignificant contribution to the field of requirements engineering research, in which issues ofbusiness strategy and strategic alignment have gone unaddressed. In addition, this thesispresents a potentially practical, real-world solution to the major, ongoing challenge of business-IT strategic alignment