Towards an Organizational Strategic Alignment Driven by Business Level Agreements

Currently, organizations that are seeking to achieve a strategic alignment between business areas and Information Technology (IT) have been increasingly using Business Process Management (BPM) and Service-oriented Architecture (SOA). BPM and SOA, when used together, can help to achieve this goal. In this context, a Service Level Agreement (SLA) is commonly used to define and monitor the establishment of the relationship between business and IT, including the technical level of this relationship. However, a previous agreement, in a higher and wider level of this relationship, is necessary so that this desired strategic alignment can be achieved in the way that was expected, and this can take the form of a Business Level Agreement (BLA). This paper proposes the integrated use of BLAs and SLAs, together with a business processes modelling language (in this case, BPMN -- Business Process Modeling and Notation) and a business process execution languages (in this case, WS-BPEL -- Web Services Business Process Execution Language), in a search for a strategic alignment. An overall description of the proposed approach is presented, including a simple illustrative example, in order to foster the conduction of more research works in this area.