Metrics for Assessing the Basic Alignment Between Business Process and Enterprise Information Architectures with Reference to the BPAOntoEIA Framework

Abstract

For the contemporary enterprise, Business-IT strategic alignment is instrumental for the business advantage. The evaluation of this alignment is important for continuous improvement at the infra-structure levels of business and IT, which is enhanced if the enterprise information architecture has a complete knowledge of business processes, their orchestration and models. This paper presents metrics for assessing the basic BPA-EIA alignment at the lowest architectural levels obtained through BPAOntoEIA framework, which employs a design science approach to derive a semantic EIA from a semantic object- based BPA approach. The basic assessment metrics are defined for derivation of EIA entities. Their values have been stated for a cancer care case-study showing a promising degree of BPA-EIA alignment. The framework is expected to provide a high degree of alignment for other EIA elements when derived from the associated business orocess architecture.