Correlating Business Objectives with Services: An Ontology-Driven Approach

Ensuring that the IT/business functions of an organization realize its business objectives has long been recognized as a critically important question. This paper reports on a project that seeks to overturn established management orthodoxy by establishing that business objectives can be adequately modeled by leveraging a domain ontology and that methodological and tool support can be provided for the task of correlating the objectives of an organization and its service offerings. This paper presents an interim report from this project that describes how to leverage a domain ontology in i) building business objective/goal models in a top-down manner (required to be able to refine these to a level where there could be an ontological match between the languages used to describe objectives and services); ii) assessing the degree of ontological match between low-level objectives and business services as a step towards an automated framework for establishing strategic service alignment. We provide a brief illustration of our in-progress implementation within a toolkit called ServAlign.