BUSINESS AND INFORMATION SYSTEMS MISALIGNMENT: DIAGNOSIS, THERAPY AND PROPHYLAXIS TECHNIQUES BASED ON SYNDROMES
Author(s):
Gonçalo Carvalho,
Pedro Sousa
Paper abstract: Alignment is an intentional state organizations aim at. Misalignments are the factors that organizations as
a whole and its organizational actor as enablers face in their routine business operations. This paper
proposes a misalignment approach based on medical sciences, arguing that by observing organizations as
systems and using an approach similar to that adopted by the medical sciences in the study of the human
body system, the misalignment classification and management capabilities might be improved. We
believe that the medical science concepts provide an interesting foundation to set the misalignment
semantics and terminology, thus establishing the grounds of a misalignment classification schema and
providing techniques to detect, correct and prevent the misalignments. Therefore, using a metaphor
between disease and misalignment, a set of concepts defined by medical science, such as symptom, sign,
syndrome, etiology, diagnosis, therapy and prophylaxis, are adapted to address the problem of
misalignment between business and information systems.
Based on both academic research and years of professional consultancy, the authors propose an initial
and possible instantiation to those concepts, establishing a misalignment classification scheme that links
enterprise architecture views, misalignment symptoms and causes, and defining techniques to detect,
correct and prevent misalignments.
Keywords:
Alignment, Misalignment, Classification Scheme, Enterprise Architecture, Medical Sciences
