An Ontology-Based Approach for Supporting Business-IT Alignment

B-SCP (Business Strategy, Context, and Process) is a promising framework addressing alignment of IT with business strategy from a requirements engineering perspective. The B-SCP approach combines goal and context modeling, and business processes, into a generic modeling framework that deconstructs these to IT requirements and context. However, a problem with the B-SCP framework is that it is difficult to track dependencies between requirements in a project of realistic complexity. To address this we discuss how the RDF (Resource Description Framework) data model with OWL (Web Ontology Language) semantics will greatly benefit an implementation using B-SCP. Our contribution is to extend B-SCP by describing an ontology data structure for representing the requirements and the complex rules which map them together. The benefit in our approach is that it provides a comprehensive way to validate the decomposition of the requirements. Seven–Eleven Japan is used as an exemplar to demonstrate improved productivity and consistency of B-SCP.