The IT-Socket: Model-Based Business and IT Alignment

As a result of the ongoing evolution of IT from an enabler to an industrial sector in its own right – supporting businesses in different sectors of economy on an individual basis – alignment of Business and IT is regarded as a necessary requirement for efficient operation. This paper introduces the EU project plugIT that aims to develop an “IT-Socket” that will realize the vision of businesses “plugging-in” to IT. The results of plugIT are demonstrated within three scenarios from the IT domain that deal with: (1) “Certification” of IT infrastructure enabling regulation compliant operation of IT, (2) “Virtual Organization” aiming at evolving service orientation to a higher abstraction level focusing on business driven aspects as well as, (3) “Governance” of IT infrastructure introducing business context into distributed and complex systems applying the model-driven approach developed within the project. The paper presents the results of the first 6 months of the project within the area of use-case and application scenario development by applying the developed IT-Socket Modeling Framework as a coherent and comprehensive means for externalizing knowledge. The results achieved build up the basis for further research work related to the Semantic Kernel and implementation at the use-case partners within the Next Generation Modeling Framework.