Managing the alignment between business processes and software systems

• State of the art of methods for managing the alignment at the strategic and functional level.
• An approach for evaluating the alignment level existing between business processes and software systems.
• A supporting tool for automatically modeling business and software assets and measuring the alignment level.
• Evaluation of the approach through an operative case study.

ContextThe alignment degree existing between a business process and the supporting software systems strongly affects the performance of the business process execution. Methodologies and tools are needed for detecting the alignment level and keeping a business process aligned with the supporting software systems even when they evolve.ObjectiveThis paper aims to provide an adequate support for managing such a kind of alignment and suggesting evolution actions if misalignment is detected. It proposes an approach including modeling and measuring activities for evaluating the alignment level and suggesting evolution activities, if needed.MethodThe proposed approach is composed of three main phases. The first phase regards the modeling of business process and software systems supporting it by applying a modeling notation based on UML and adequately extended for representing business processes. The second phase concerns the evaluation of the alignment degree through the assessment of a set of metrics codifying the alignment concept. Finally, the last phase analyses the evaluation results for suggesting evolution activities if misalignment is detected.ResultsThe paper analyses the application of the proposed approach to a case study regarding a working business process and related software system. The obtained results provided useful suggestion for evolving the supporting software system and improving the alignment level existing between them and the supported business process.ConclusionThe approach contributes in all phases of the process and software system evolution, even if its improvement can be needed for identifying the impact of the changes. The proposed approach facilitates the understanding of business processes, software systems and related models. This favors the interaction of the software and business analysts, as it was possible to better formulate the interviews to be conducted with regard to the objectives and, thus, to collect the required data.