Modelling Strategic Alignment of Business and IT through Enterprise Architecture: Augmenting Archimate with BMM

Abstract

In the last decade, Enterprise Architecture (EA) has been proposed to have the potential to improve and support strategic alignment between business and IT. This paper presents a new model, using a new modelling technique based on two leading modelling techniques, to depict strategic alignment between business and IT through the lens of an Enterprise Architecture framework, The Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF). The contribution of this paper is two-fold. Firstly, it augmented the Archimate modelling notation with the constructs of the Business Motivation Model (BMM) to present a more comprehensive technique of modelling strategic alignment of business and IT. Secondly, the paper also presents a new model that aims to explain the mechanism through which an Enterprise Architecture can enable strategic alignment between business and IT.