A Contribution to Organizational and Operational Strategic Alignment: Incorporating Business Level Agreements into Business Process Modeling

Abstract

The purpose for achieving strategic alignment between Information Technology (IT) and Business areas refers to the need of large organizations to exploit the IT's ability to deliver good products and services, thereby standing out in a competitive scenario. Within this context, Business Process Management and Service Orientation tend to gain space in organizations, since they are able to automate and optimize processes and services for the business. In the business process analysis and modeling phase, it is important to treat not only functional properties, but also process quality and operating constraints, usually grouped as Non-Functional Properties (NFP); thereby preventing that investments in IT are wasted on inefficiency and rework. In order to address these constraints, Business Level Agreements (BLA) and Service Level Agreements (SLA) should be used. The most prestigious languages for business process modeling, including Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN), lack the representation of these NFPs. The approach proposed in this paper, BLA@BPMN, extends BPMN to embody BLAs, as part of a bigger approach to foster strategic alignment in this context. A BLA is specified in the process model level so that it can be mapped to a set of SLAs at the executable process level.