Using a Medical Sciences Perspective to Harness Business and Information Systems Misalignment

Aligning business and information systems has been in the scope of research initiatives from decades. Recently, some efforts emerged with a complementary approach focused on the misalignments study. This paper proposes a misalignment approach based on the medical science perspective for nomenclature, classification and detection of misalignments. We show that a metaphor between disease and misalignment is reasonable and we present how a full set of concepts defined by medical science, such as symptom, sign, syndrome, etiology, diagnosis, therapy and prophylaxis, can be used to address the problem of misalignment between business and information systems. Additionally, each proposed concept is instantiated with a set of examples based on both academic research and professional consultancy.