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Information Technology (IT) is at the heart of the operational excellence and has the potential to propel an organization to the top in a short time. Mastering this asset is of a strategic importance and needs an IT Governance (ITG): a system by which the current and future use of IT is directed and controlled (International Organization for Standardization [ISO], 2015). It allows to govern and align IT with strategic decisions (Tavana et al., 1995) to realize benefits for the business (Gunasekaran et al., 2016) while minimizing risks.
There are many IT frameworks like the well-known Control Objectives for Information and related Technology (COBIT), IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) or ISO 38500. They can, either be general, or treat a specific domain like Enterprise Architecture (EA), risk management, IT security or IT management. Moreover, theses ITG frameworks represent best practices in their respective areas. Knowing the interactions between them in order to integrate and merge them into one whole IT framework can favor to the synergy of best practices across the organization, which can increase the potential of IT.
Often, ITG frameworks are qualified or viewed as too complex to apprehend, with a steep learning curve, and challenges, which limits their implementations and integration (Othman and Chan, 2013, Bartens et al., 2015, Ndlovu and Kyobe, 2016 and Mulgund et al., 2019). Despite the complexity, integration should take place in order to give a clear direction of IT to support and align with the business strategic vision.
ITG favors the Business IT alignment (BITA) which in turn, creates value to the organization (Haes and Grembergen, 2015). Venkatraman et al. (1993) defined IT alignment as the degree of fit and integration among business strategy, IT strategy, business infrastructure and IT infrastructure. These four components compose the Strategic Alignment Model (SAM) and the objective is having them aligned.
A lack of integration between the business and IT has multiple negative effects (Peterson, 2001) among them are: (1) IT does not understand the Business (2) Business takes no responsibility for IT enabled business initiatives (3) Wasted IT investment and (4) less revenues.
SAM is a popular model but is still generic and not adapted to a specific sector. As the present work focuses on the supply chain (SC) context with the framework Supply Chain Operation Reference (SCOR), the Figure 1 presents a view of SAM with SCOR and COBIT and their scopes. SCOR represents the Business perspective with the SC view, COBIT represents the IT perspective and SAM encompasses the different elements of comparison.
Figure 1. SAM model with SCOR and COBIT scopes
In the literature, we can find examples of mapping between IT related frameworks as described in section 2.4. There is a gap in literature concerning the mapping between ITG frameworks and business focused frameworks like SCOR for Supply chain.
The present paper proposes a mapping approach of COBIT and SCOR with ArchiMate, which is the most used Enterprise Architecture (EA) tool according to the recent review of (Zhou et al., 2020). EA allows to view the evolution path from the IT current state to the IT target and to link the business layer with the IT and Technology layers (Dale, 2016).
SCOR is a SC framework that it is not linked to EA. Thus, mapping SCOR and COBIT with ArchiMate contributes to have a broad and integrated view of both frameworks with the same language. It can be part of the integration plan to have a fusion of Business and IT competencies as recommended by (Peterson, 2004). This fusion is complex due to the variety of value drivers and stakeholders.