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Nowadays, numerous approaches aiming at validation, measurement, and improvement of business-IT alignment are developed by the research community (Bleistein, 2005; Bodhuin, 2004; Kearns & Ledere, 2003; Campbell & Avison, 2004; Luftman, 2000; Rychkova, 2008; Simonin, 2007; Wegman, 2005; Wieringa, 2003). However, many of these approaches have difficulties in being adopted by the industrial organizations whose needs they are addressing.
To identify and eliminate a malfunction in a car, a mechanic needs to know the vehicle’s technical characteristics (from the car registration book), its current state, and accident history (from the car maintenance book), and its condition of exploitation. This information represents an important input for the diagnostics and repair. Along similar lines, approaches for diagnostics and assessment of business-IT alignment strongly rely on their input data - models, specifications, and other documents that describe an organization “As-Is”. The quality of this input data is one of the main factors affecting the applicability of EA approaches.
Problem: Research approaches in EA are particularly sensitive to input data quality. In practice, organizations cannot meet the high requirements that researchers define for the input data (e.g., data models, business process models, IS documentation, etc.). Often such data is incomplete or does not exist at all. This prevents the innovative research approaches from being adopted by practitioners (Figure 1).
In this work we do not encourage the organizations to improve their process documentation in order to benefit from innovative research. In contrast, we claim that researchers themselves can significantly improve the applicability of their approaches. In this article we discuss the guided implementation that allows a researcher (or a group of researchers) to build up necessary input data based on the documentation and other information sources available in the organization.
Hypothesis: We believe that using the build-up process, it is possible to increase the applicability of the research approach and, in spite of the initial absence of input measurable parameters, to deliver meaningful results to practitioners.
The approach to measure the fitness relationship between business and IT in organizations presented in (Etien & Rolland, 2005) is an example of an EA approach developed in academia. This approach addresses the problem of business-IT alignment: it defines metrics to quantify the fit between the business of an organization and the IT systems that support it. Metrics application (the process called here and below the fitness measurement) allows organizations (i) to identify precisely the aspects of business (business goals, activities, and so on) that are not supported or ill-supported by the existing IT and (ii) to specify the strategies to improve business-IT alignment.