Configurative Alignment of Business and Application Services: A Work Systems Perspective

There are different ways of defining business and IT alignment. On one end it is possible to look at the alignment from the strategic perspective; on another end we can go down to the small granularity manual and software functions to see how they are related via human-computer interfaces. In this paper we take a work systems perspective in addressing the alignment between business and IT. In particular, we consider service systems by describing the services at several levels of granularity where they can be instantiated in manual, semi-automatic, and automatic modes of functioning. This perspective helps to address some design challenges for flexible work systems that require intention- and situation-dependent alignment between human and artificial work to manage multiple options of heterogeneous service configurations. The proposed alignment approach is illustrated by education demand and offer correspondence monitoring services.