Stra2Bis: A Model-Driven Method for Aligning Business Strategy and Business Processes

MDA-based initiatives for software development have included computation-independent models to align information system models with business knowledge which is important in the development process. One source of business knowledge is the business strategy, which, traditionally, has had a long-term perspective; changes in the organisational structure and their high-level ends and means were less frequent and arguably not relevant for software development. However, organisations that aim to accelerate their software development cycles define their business strategy and reconfigure their structure on a short-term, continuous basis, fusing, splitting and creating as independent as possible organisation units. These changes directly affect the business processes and the design of software components of the organisation. Based on this approach to business strategy, we propose Stra2Bis, a method for designing strategically aligned business processes in an MDA-based context. Stra2Bis proposes a business strategy modelling step when redesigning business processes and three transformation guidelines to support the analysis of the alignment of processes with the organisational structure and the measurement of the units' outcomes. We discussed the effect of the guidelines on the software design with five professionals who supported the proposal's feasibility and usefulness.