Integrating B-SCP and MAP to manage the evolution of strategic IT requirements
Introduction
Strategic alignment of IT exists when a business organization’s goals, activities, and processes are in harmony with the information systems that support them [1]. Appropriate alignment positively influences IT effectiveness [2] and leads to superior business performance [3]. CIOs (Chief Information Officers) and IT executives consistently rank business-IT alignment as a key priority [4], [5], [6], [7], [8]. Alignment means making sure that the IT an organization either builds or buys to help deliver upon a competitive strategy does in fact meet the business needs of the organization [9]. For example, when a retail bank decides to overhaul its IT infrastructure across its customer branches [10], there are a number of key decisions that need to be made for both the business and its IT. The business has to decide the purpose of the overhaul, what objectives it wishes to achieve, to calculate the best return on investment, and plan a course of action to make this happen. The IT department – CTO/CIO – is communicated the business objectives (in this case direct from the Executive Board), and attempts to match its proposed solution to business objectives, and expected returns that the Board have set. In such a case, both business and IT not only have to be confident that they are aligned but they also have to provide evidence of this assertion in a language that both parties understand. If an organization’s competitive strategy is dependent upon the successful deployment of IT, such as in the example above, then getting the alignment right is fundamental. Another example, Kokune et al. [11], present an approach to aligning the IT requirements of a supply chain management system to the strategy of a large automobile manufacturer in order to validate that the IT was indeed meeting the expectations of the business. Kokune et al. found that they could justify many of the IT requirements but unearthed a number of conflicting goals that cost the automobile manufacturer millions of dollars. Getting alignment right means getting the requirements right. There are some success stories, such as those described above. However, there is an enormous amount of waste. For example, IBM estimates that 40% of IT expenditure brings no return and that 53% of that waste is in the strategic area, such as duplicated lines of business and IT not meeting business objectives [12]. This leads to enormous financial waste – Gartner assesses this was $351bn in 2002 and we can assume that trend is continuing [13]. Despite the clear relationship between business strategy and requirements engineering and the potentially large rewards for solving this problem, issues of business strategy and strategic alignment are all but ignored in the requirements engineering research literature.
An organization’s business strategy can be defined as “the understanding of an industry structure and dynamics, determining the organization’s relative position in that industry and taking action either to change the industry’s structure or the organization’s position to improve organizational results” [14]. Business strategy thus includes both the rationale for, and the means by which a business organization competes with industry rivals [15]. Various aspects of business analysis have been addressed in the requirements engineering research literature, including organizational structure and dependency relationships among actors in a system [16], [17], economic and business value analysis [18], organizational goal-driven business process modelling [19], [20], and elicitation of organizational goals from which to derive requirements [21]. Other research takes an enterprise modelling view in requirements analysis [22], [23], [24]. However, none of the requirements engineering approaches cited above include explicit analysis of an organization’s competitive business strategy or strategic alignment.
Two approaches that model organisational business strategy and strategic alignment, B-SCP and MAP have emerged from the research community. B-SCP (Business Strategy, Context, Process) [25], [26] captures and models competitive business strategy and its context and explicitly traces them to IT requirements to ensure alignment. The B-SCP methodology is designed to represent strategic alignment as snapshots in time and does not address requirements evolution. MAP [27] is a strategy-driven process modelling technique that identifies goals as intentions and processes as strategies to achieve these intentions. It employs a refinement technique to generate detailed-level MAP models. To address the evolution of requirements, MAP identifies ‘As-Is’ and ‘To-Be’ models to represent current and future systems respectively. MAP uses Gap Analysis to address new requirements into the current requirements model [28].
Evolution of requirements is a modern requirements engineering phenomenon driven by the extensive use of IT in organisational business processes. Given that the B-SCP framework aligns technical level IT requirements with organisational business strategy, evolution of IT requirements affects the whole B-SCP requirements architecture up to organisational business strategy. Currently, B-SCP uses Role Activity Diagram (RAD) to represent business processes related to B-SCP’s goal model [29]. RAD does not support refinement of a process model and it is difficult to integrate it within B-SCP framework due to the development notations used In addition, RAD seems more useful for technical level requirements modelling of business processes. To deal with requirements evolution in the B-SCP framework, we propose integrating MAP with B-SCP. In addition, MAP represents requirements as business processes within the framework. Further, we will be able to elicit strategic to technical level process models by using a MAP refinement approach integrated into the B-SCP framework. More importantly, through this integrated approach, we will use MAP’s Gap Analysis technique to incorporate new requirements into a current system of requirements while maintaining strategic alignment. The result of combining B-SCP and MAP approaches provides a more complete method for modelling strategic alignment.
The long-term objective of this research is to provide an integrated framework that enables:
- (i)
Elicitation and representation of business strategy in a B-SCP requirements model, ensuring traceability between competitive business strategy and IT requirements;
- (ii)
Capturing the evolution of strategic IT requirements in terms of ‘As-Is’ and ‘To-Be’ models by using the B-SCP’s integrated framework. And application of MAP’s Gap Analysis procedure for the smooth and efficient transition of new requirements into a current system of requirements.
- RQ1:
Is it possible to integrate MAP with B-SCP?
- RQ2:
What are the commonalities in the two approaches that allow for integration?
- RQ3:
What are the benefits of integrating MAP with B-SCP?
This paper extends initial ideas for the integration presented in [30] by providing a more detailed explanation of the planned integration process, presents a complete exemplar and provides further evaluation.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows: Section 2 presents the background to B-SCP and MAP and other related issues. Section 3 presents the concept of integration and the integration approach adopted. Section 4 presents the development of B-SCP and MAP models using Seven Eleven Japan’s (SEJ) case study [31], [32], together with their refinement, and application of the integration approach. Section 5 presents a discussion and evaluation of the integration approach. Section 6 presents our conclusions and outlines future work.
Section snippets
B-SCP
To address the alignment of requirements with competitive business strategy, Bleistein et al. [25], [26] present B-SCP, a requirements analysis approach for verification and validation of requirements in terms of alignment with and support for business strategy. B-SCP is based upon the three themes of business strategy, context, and process. For each of the themes a requirements analysis technique is used i∗ goal modelling [16] for representing strategy, Jackson context diagrams [33] for
Integrating B-SCP and MAP
In this section, we present the rationale for, and steps required to integrate B-SCP and MAP. Section 3.1 compares B-SCP and MAP in detail and highlights similarities and differences. Section 3.2 presents how an integrated B-SCP and MAP framework is used over time. Section 3.3 presents a conceptual model of the integration approach. Section 3.4 describes our integration approach for B-SCP and MAP.
Case overview
In 1997, SEJ had been managing a national franchise of 7000 independently-owned convenience stores (Seven-Eleven Japan Co. Ltd., 2005) [31]. SEJ’s Chief Executive Officer (CEO)’s plan was to use IT to enable SEJ to leverage information to coordinate a supply chain of business partners to ensure that stores were stocked with precisely the products that consumers want when they want them [31], [32]. These business partners include product suppliers, who make or distribute the products for sale in
Discussion and evaluation
B-SCP and MAP are requirements modelling approaches that can model organisational business strategy and comprehensively refine and align these models with detailed level models. These are distinct features of B–SCP and MAP approaches over the referenced works i∗ [16], Tropos [17], KAOS [47]. We integrated B-SCP with MAP to address the problem of strategic requirements evolution. We could have developed two ‘As-Is’ and ‘To-Be’ B-SCP models in isolation representing current and enhanced systems,
Conclusions and future work
Evolution is a requirements engineering phenomenon of growing importance due to the increasing rate of business and IT change. Evolution of requirements occurs not only at the technical level but also at the strategic level. To address the requirements evolution problem across strategic requirements models, we have integrated MAP into B-SCP. B-SCP is a requirements analysis approach that explicitly aligns IT requirements with organisational business strategy [25]. MAP is strategy driven process
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