Business and IT-alignment: A plug-in approach for model-oriented knowledge transfer

Today we´re witnessing the necessity to align Business and Information Technology (IT). Based on the assumption that businesses in different sectors of the economy will require IT for different reasons and in different ways, this paper describes the challenges arising and our solutions concerning that alignment. More specifically, we present the Semantic Kernel, which is the core element of our Next Generation Modelling Framework (NGMF). Our idea is to link human interpretable graphical models - partly semi-formal - with machine interpretable semantic formalisms to enable: (1) a tighter involvement of domain experts when expressing formal knowledge in the specification of business requirements on IT infrastructure and services, (2) different graphical modelling languages for different views in order to provide modelling languages the domain expert is accustomed to work with. The research challenges are discussed, and the first prototype of the Semantic Kernel and its application at the use case site is introduced.