Living IT infrastructures — An ontology-based approach to aligning IT infrastructure capacity and business needs

•Ontology to model the relationship between IT resources and business processes.•Method for defining IT support to business and calculate IT costs for IT services.•Mapping the dynamic complexity of IT infrastructure resources and business processes.

Changes in organizational processes often interact with changes in the IT infrastructure. Accounting for the structural and economic consequences of changes to the modern IT infrastructure remains a challenge, as their complexity can affect more than one business process, and the need to share a common understanding between the IT and the business management challenges current IT governance practices. An integrative perspective of business processes and IT resources would help meet these challenges, but despite some progress such a perspective remains to be developed. This paper proposes a domain ontology – an Ontology for Linking Processes and IT infrastructure (OLPIT) – to model the relationship between IT resources and business processes for the purpose of measuring the business value of IT. The ontology was developed and evaluated in the context of a design research project conducted in the Hilti Corporation, an international manufacturing company, with the aim of defining how IT impacts the business and calculating the cost of IT services used.