adfa, p. 1, 2011. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2011 Modeling Organizational Alignment Henrique Prado Sousa, Julio Cesar Sampaio do Prado Leite Departamento de Informática, PUC-Rio, Rio de Janeiro, Brasil, hsousa@inf.puc-rio.br, www.inf.puc-rio.br/~julio Abstract. In the world of business, even small advantages make a difference. As such, establishing strategic goals becomes a very important practice. However, the big challenge is in the designing of processes aligned with the goals. Modeling goals and processes in an integrated way improves the traceability among strategic and operational layers, easing up the alignment problem. Keywords: Business process modeling; Goal modeling, BPM, KPI, i*, BPMN. 1 Introduction. Organizational alignment, a concept explored in organizational theory, has different patterns according to the viewpoint from which it is defined or from the standpoint of who define it [13]. According to Sender [14]: “Organizational alignment is the degree to which an organization’s design, strategy, and culture are cooperating to achieve the same desired goals”. It is a measurement of the agreement or relative distance be- tween several ideal and real elements of organizational life. In the field of information systems, alignment has been researched in a more focused pattern, where the object of alignment is not the organization, but the relationship of IT processes with the organi- zation needs [5]. Our work aims to fill a gap, that is; providing proper support for organizational alignment by means of conceptual models, since the work driven by the IT perspective, put more emphasis on the operational aspects. Studies [9], [12] believe that the lack of proper tools and notations to represent other layers, than the operational one, is a culprit on this limited approach. It could be also due to the inher- itance of a historical workflow view and the consequent practice of, preferentially, working only at the "practical" details and analysis of the operational layer. It is important to clarify that organization theory usually understand organizations in three decision levels: strategic, tactical and operational. As such, languages that focus just on processes leads to models focusing mainly on the operational decision level, whereas languages with more abstract concepts such as goals, are more apt to have models that deals with the other levels. Given this context, we frame organiza- tional alignment as a way to have all three levels of decisions aligned, which of course may involve different patterns. As such, if models are used to help managing the organization alignment they need to have proper representations to different levels of decision. The invention of goal-oriented requirements engineering brought new