A methodological framework for business-IT alignment

Organizations are characterized by the usage of multiple applications and heterogeneous technological environments. Although business and IT processes are defined quite good, the processes themselves are quite different and locked in the specific application areas. As a result the language of those areas are also specific what helps to maintain the distance of the processes and make hard the mutual understanding between business and IT units. Conscious that the frequent interaction among business and IT units in any organization turned out to be the single most important factor of IT usage, this article presents a methodological framework for business-IT alignment, based on process modeling and ontology theory. The aim of the proposed methodological framework is to combine different domain ontologies - specifically business and IT, with organization processes, to achieve better organization productivity through the use of a common language.