BITAM: An engineering-principled method for managing misalignments between business and IT architectures

As the rates of business and technological changes accelerate, misalignments between business and IT architectures are inevitable. Existing alignment models, while important for raising awareness of alignment issues, have provided little in the way of guidance for actually correcting misalignment and thus achieving alignment. This paper introduces the BITAM (Business IT Alignment Method) which is a process that describes a set of twelve steps for managing, detecting and correcting misalignment. The methodology is an integration of two hitherto distinct analysis areas: business analysis and architecture analysis. The BITAM is illustrated via a case study conducted with a Fortune 100 company.