INTRODUCTION

Corporate managers and professionals in information systems are constantly confronted to the subject of strategic Information System alignment. Solving this problematic is essential and indispensable for planning and organizing IS/Business synergies in accordance with the strategic directions and innovative intelligences integrated into the overall governance of the company. This concept is widely discussed in theory but rarely on the conceptual and operational levels.

Since the study of Henderson and Venkatraman (1993) the organizational performance based on information system is considered in many researches as the result of a set of factors that interact coherently. The theoretical global consensus emerging is to consider strategic alignment (Fig. 1) as a prerequisite to achieving organizational performance o f the company (Luftman and Maclean, 2004). Although there is no standard method for deploying and executing the strategic IS alignment, we propose in this work a practical approach based mainly on the extension of the Enterprise Meta-model ISO/DIS (ISO 19440, 2007). This extension integrates the necessary structures for developing systemic tools, based on the structural paradigm to better lead the evolutions of the strategic IS alignment (Boulmakoul et al., 2007, 2009).

In this study, we deploy this approach in a real context of a leading Moroccan telecommunication operator. We apply structural matrix for a particular area of the company in order to integrate them into a specific platform for viewing the lattice generated. The conclusion of this work defines the strengths that can be drawn from this technique and future prospects to develop.

Fig. 1:	Strategic alignment context

STATE OF THE ART

Strategic is alignment: The term "strategic alignment" expresses the idea to establish and follow a course. This is to coordinate the strategy of the information system with the company's business strategy. Lederer and Sethi (1992) define strategic alignment of information systems as the process of deciding the objectives of organizational computing and identifying potential computer applications which the organization should implement. Other approaches define strategic alignment according to the following quotation: The alignment process refers to an organizational process where the mission, goals, objectives, and activities of the IS change over time in parallel with changes in the organization (Henderson and Venkatraman, 1993).

Business process management (BPM): The Business Process Management (http://www.bpmi.org) is all about transferring the results of business process re-engineering discussed above into production. BPM technology provides not only the tools and infrastructure to define, simulate, and analyze business process models, but also the tools to implement business processes in such a way that the execution of the resulting software artefacts can be managed from a business process perspective.

According to Mathias (2007), BPM includes concepts, methods and techniques to support the design, administration configuration and analysis of business processes.

BPM is a key concept for placing business processes at the center of an overall integration (process-centric) and offers a new understanding of the role of technology in favor of management and performance. A BPM solution generally includes a tool for modeling business processes of the company, the tools for implementation and execution motor responsible for instantiating the process and store the context and status in a database.

Process mapping: The process mapping of a company or organization is a representation that allows synthetic reading of all processes the company uses to achieve its objectives. The mapping process is based primarily on the identification and categorization of key business processes. In this context, it should:

Enterprise meta-modelling: Modeling of the enterprise as complex socio-technical dynamic system stands as an indispensable means of organizations research to extract useful knowledge to the different steps of the strategic Information System alignment. It produces a rational thought on specific meta-knowledge needed for any formal or informal representation of the system studied, in order to increase the overall performance of the company. Many languages and methods have been developed such BPDM, Standards: ISO 14258, ISO/15704, ISO/TR/10314, ENV/12204, ENV/40003. Currently, many studies contribute to the definition of a unified language for enterprise modelling (Unified Enterprise Modeling Language) (OMG, 2005).

ISO 19440 meta-model: The research efforts of the 1990s in terms of enterprise modelling lead to a standardized framework to meet the needs of a systemic approach of the enterprise, it’s the ISO 19440 2007 meta-model oriented process models. It offers four views on these models: the organizational view, the informational view, the functional view and the view of resources (ISO 19440, 2007) (Fig. 2).

Fig. 2:	ISO 19440 (2007) views with teleological anchoring

The ISO 19440 (2007) Meta-model is given in Fig. 3, according the four points of view mentioned above. The informational view is the representation of the information System data. The organizational view focuses on strategy of the enterprise. The functional view focuses on the processes. The view of resources is related to the resources used by business processes of the enterprise.

The Meta-model contains constructs identified by a common structure:

One area represents the border and the contents of an enterprise business or part of an enterprise. A business process represents a certain part of corporate behaviour. A business process is an aggregation of business processes and/or business activities and information described by the rules of management. The enterprise activity is to achieve a transformation of inputs to outputs by specific resources. The enterprise activity and business process collectively are called Enterprise Function. Management rules are used to define the behaviour of a business process. They define the constraints on scheduling, and dependencies between business processes and/or enterprise activity. An event starts the execution of a business process or activity. A special type of class event is an order. An order is an instruction for the execution of an activity.

The COBIT framework: The COBIT referential (Control Objectives for Information and Technology) (ISACA, 2008) was created in 1996 by ISACA (Information Systems Audit and Control Association). This referential provides a reference framework and a set of tools for controlling and monitoring the governance of the information system. COBIT is based on a set of good practices, which proposes to establish a process oriented steering of the IS in order to contribute effectively to the alignment of technology on business strategy. The COBIT framework meets the needs of the enterprise by four major features: It focuses on the trades of the enterprise, is organized by the process, is based on checks and systematically uses measurements.

Fig. 3:	The ISO 19440 2007 meta-model

Fig. 4:	Interconnection of COBIT components

COBIT components are all interconnected and aimed at meeting the needs of governance, management, control and assurance of different actors, as shown in Fig. 4.

[ISO19440-COBIT] synergy: Due to its focus in terms of monitoring and measurement of IT processes, we have borrowed specific elements from COBIT in order to incorporate them in the ISO 19440 meta-model. So, a specialization of "Functional Entity" has been proposed to model IT processes using resources in a connotation IT resource. This entity is modelled as a specialization of the entity "Resource".

We added also the abstract concept "objective" which was proposed in ISO 19440 as its functional aspect and remains the checkpoint of operation area of the enterprise, business processes and activities (Fig. 5).

Fig. 5:	Integration of the “objective” entity and COBIT specifics elements

Table 1:	Matrix describing the relation R of the context C

In the following we briefly recall the necessary elements on the Galois lattice and the Meta-model extended.

Galois lattices: The concept lattice (or Galois lattice) is a mathematical structure to represent non-disjoint classes underlying a set of described objects using a set of attributes (Wille, 1982). Lattices are algebraic structures used in various fields, and were used in data mining (Sharma et al., 2007).

The value of concept (Galois) lattices can be summarized as follows:

Example: Consider the context C represented by the triplet (O, A, R) where O, A are sets and R a relation. The binary matrix describing the relation R of the context C is given by Table 1, where O = (R1, R2, R3, R4, R5, R6) and A = (P1, P2, P3, P4, P5).

This context reflects that a resource X is used or not by the process Y.

In best practices of systemic, the functional structure is described by the processes, main pillars of business and candidates to interact with all components of the system. These interactions can be captured by appropriate structural matrix capable of providing a detailed view on the process tree and their arrangement with the other basic components of the meta-model.

Various types of structural matrices from various possible interactions can be defined: process/process coupling through resource; activity/resource link; process dependency by entropy measures, information/resource link; process/goal association, objective/indicator coupling through metrics, etc.

In this semantics, for the various problems of alignment of IS: (organization, activity, process) x (resource) (activity, process, resource) x (information) (activity, process, organization) x (information), we propose the construction of structural matrices and through appropriate structures initiate consistent analysis of such structures to assess the strategic information system alignment.

Structures that we suggest in this work are divided into two categories: structures that allow a single reading of the matrix structural analysis, namely the Galois lattice (order structure with closure concept) and the method Q-analysis (structure from algebraic topology).

Fig. 6:	Integration of structural analysis

In this work, we limit ourselves to the structural analysis by the Galois lattice. Other tools will be considered in other future work (Boulmakoul et al., 2009).

Extended view of the ISO/DSI 19440 meta-model: We recall that the ISO 19440 extended Meta-model is based primarily on specific entities borrowed from COBIT as well as systemic tools that could translate explicitly the problem of IS alignment in different aspects. Figure 6 shows ISO/19440 Meta-model with constructs proposed.

In the following section, we treat one of these matrices to highlight the contribution of this alternative for the assessment of the strategic IS alignment on a concrete area.

CASE STUDY

Here, we propose the deployment of this approach to provide better visibility to the evaluation of strategic IS alignment in a leader Moroccan company in the field of telecommunications.

The use of specific built from COBIT for the extension of ISO 19440 meta-model joins synergistically to the use of systemic tools. Other structural matrix resulting from combinatorial interactions between different classes of meta-model can be studied. The parallelism of these two determinants can test the evaluation of strategic IS alignment and its contribution to organizational performance of the company.

Global mapping processes: The processes identified in the operator management system are classified into three categories, including process compounds themselves, by other processes, interacting or not according to the context or the area covered:

Management process:

Business process:

Support processes:

Each process is identified by his identity card which has the objective of the process, inputs and outputs, customers of the process, the actors, the resources deployed, the associated documents, the main processes in interaction, the indicators for measuring process performance, etc.

Fig. 7:	General mapping process of studied operator

Fig. 8:	Class diagram of the operator mapping process (functional view of the meta-model)

Figure 7 illustrates the various processes related at the operator studied.

Figure 8 provides a projection of the company meta-model according to the functional point of view. It houses various classes annotated corresponding relations.

One process is driven by one or more drivers and contains other processes. A process uses one or more resources: IT resources, human resources, material etc. The goal of a process is focused on objectives that can be influenced by the customer. Achieving these objectives is broken down into activities through a performance measured by indicators.

DEPLOYMENT

Matrix studied: In this section, we only consider the particular structural matrix (Process/IT Resource): The elements of this matrix consist primarily of a set of processes using, or not using, IT resources, and generating intersection points which may provide formal analysis for the evaluation of strategic IS alignment (Table 3).

Table 2:	(Business process/IT resource) in a specific context

Table 3:	(Process- IT Resource) matrix of the operator studied

The elements of our matrix are:

Deployment: To visualize the lattice of this context, we used the Galicia solution. This is an open platform built to create, view and save the concept (Galois) lattice through a multitude of algorithms to calculate and display data and extract the association rules of given context.

Given the large volume of data of qour larger context we consider a sample of several elements including some business processes and IT resources for a simple and effective visualization of the lattices generated (Table 2).

All binary annotations are purely illustrative and not a projection of the reality, according to the information security policy adopted by the company.

A concept combines a maximum set of objects with the set of attributes that these objects share. For example:
The resource "Business-IS" is used by all processes except "Managing other operators" and "Risk management"

IT resources "Antiviral-Servers" and "Backup-Platforms" are used only by the process "Risk management"

The process "Managing the offers", "Managing the sales", "Customer-Service", "After sales service" and "Customer Complaints", uses simultaneously the IT resource "intranet" where are found all useful information and IT resource "Business-IS" divided into applications and tools to run these processes.