A Framework for Business Process Modeling and Alignment Artur Caetano 1,2 , Marielba Zacarias 1,2 , Pedro Sousa 1,2 , António Rito Silva 1,3 , José Tribolet 1,2 1 Department of Information Systems and Computer Science, IST, Technical University of Lisbon, Portugal. 2 Organizational Engineering Center, INESC-INOV, Lisbon, Portugal. 3 Software Engineering Group, INESC-ID, Lisbon, Portugal Contact email: artur.caetano@inov.pt Address: INESC. Rua Alves Redol 9, 1000-029 Lisboa, Portugal. Phone: +351-213100258 Fax: +351-213145843 ABSTRACT This paper proposes an enterprise architecture framework that allows modeling organizational components for reuse and co- development, emphasizing their traceability and alignment at both design and execution time. It focuses on describing how entities interact in the context of business processes and relate to goals, actors and supporting systems. To facilitate the analysis of the architecture models, a set of five views that separate multiple organizational concerns is also introduced. 1. INTRODUCTION Representing knowledge about an organization proves to be a challenging task since it requires several of its aspects to be represented in a coherent and integrated way. Failing to deliver such representation hinders the assessment of the organization, as well as the detection of problems and areas of improvement. For an organization to change it must be self- aware, meaning that if the knowledge on the organizational components is not shared and understood there will be a gap between the actual state of affairs and the state as perceived by the different stakeholders. In addition, information systems accentuate these issues as they facilitate information sharing and process automation, regardless of the quality of the information and how processes are aligned with the organization goals. Despite investments on systems and technology, organizations often do not have the adequate methods that enable the management and coordination of these systems to support planning, decision making, controlling and, especially, to leverage competitive advantage. Enterprise architecture results from the process of representing and aligning the components that are required for the management of the organization. It is the set of representations required to describe a system or enterprise regarding its construction, maintenance and evolution (Zachman, 1987). It concerns the structure of the things of relevance in the enterprise, their components, and how these components fit and work together to fulfill a specific purpose within the organization. Identifying the architecture of the enterprise should therefore be considered as a fundamental step to understand and align the organizational components. Extensive related work can be found on the literature. ANSA was likely the first project to propose views, claimed to provide complete coverage of information processing systems (ANSA, 1989; Herbert, 1994). The views on enterprise, information, computation, engineering and technology were later taken up in open distributed processing standards. The concept of view enables separating the multiple concerns of a system in such a way that they can be individually addressed and later composed in a global representation. Thus, this concept shares a common goal with other approaches to enterprise architecture. RM-ODP (Farooqi, 1995; ISO, 1995; Schurmann, 1995) aimed at integrating and maintaining consistency between multiple distributed-systems standards. It includes descriptive elements that provide a common vocabulary and prescriptive elements, known as viewpoints, which constrain what can be built. Specifically, it defines the enterprise viewpoint for system boundaries, policies, and purpose; the information viewpoint to represent distributed information; the computational viewpoint for decomposition of system into distributable units; the engineering viewpoint for description of components needed and, finally, the technology viewpoint for describing the implementation details of components. The Zachman Framework (O'Rourke, 2003; Zachman, 1987) is used both from modeling and management perspectives. It describes the subjects needed for developing and documenting the enterprise architecture in a matrix. The vertical axis defines multiple perspectives on the architecture while the horizontal axis offers a classification of its artifacts. Its rows are structured around the perspectives related to user roles, namely Scope, Enterprise Model, System Model, Technology Model and Detailed Representations, while the six columns focus on separating Data (who), Function (how), Network (where), People (who), Time (when) and Motivation (why). The framework is independent of specific methodologies, but does not define how to integrate the information within each cell, nor how to describe how to trace such information neither how to specify the artifacts within each cell (Frankel, 2003). This paper proposes an enterprise architecture framework that emphasizes the traceability and alignment between organizational components, facilitating their reuse and co-development. It focuses on describing how entities interact in the context of business processes and relate to organizational goals, actors and supporting systems. The components of the