Misalignment Symptom Analysis Based on Enterprise Architecture Model Assessment

Business–IT alignment and misalignment are duality-like concepts referring to the harmony or disharmony between business and IT. The state between these two areas can be viewed either through its presence (a.k.a. alignment) or through its absence or difficulties (a.k.a. misalignment). Most of alignment studies deal with alignment achievement, while misalignment issues (detecting, analysing and correcting misalignment) are underemphasized in the literature. This paper relates to misalignment assessment. It connects misalignment analysis to enterprise architecture models with the aim to set up an enterprise architecture-based (mis)alignment assessment method. The paper first introduces the primary building blocks of architecture-based misalignment analysis. Based on the theoretical foundation the paper aims to establish the conceptual body of enterprise architecture-based misalignment symptom analysis. Different misalignment symptoms are located on TOGAF metamodel in order to detect the presence of misalignment. At the end of the paper conclusions are drawn concerning the symptom-location experiment.