KEY-PROBLEMS AND MULTI-SCREEN VIEW A Framework to Perform the Aligment of Manufacturing IS Virginie Goepp and François Kiefer INSA de Strasbourg 24, Boulevard de la Victoire 67084 – Strasbourg Cedex, France Keywords: Manufacturing information system, information alignment, multi-screen view tool, B-SCP. Abstract: In today highly competitive environment, the complete alignment of information systems (IS) that is to say not only with the strategy but also with the environment and with the uncertain evolution is crucial. For manufacturing IS these alignments are complex. The state of the art concerning IS alignment shows that the existing frameworks mainly concern managers and do not fit to the IS manufacturing context. On the one hand, B-SCP tends to operationalize these frameworks by coupling them to requirements engineering. However, only the alignment with the strategy is tackled. On the other hand, the dialectical analysis based approach of IS manufacturing development tries to integrate multiple alignments through the “multi-screen” view tool. However, the underlying concepts of this tool remain fuzzy. Therefore, this paper addresses the formalisation of the “multi-screen” view, in order to work out a framework for analysing mechanisms of multiple alignments of manufacturing IS. To do this, the contributions of coupling dialectics and “multi- screen” view to manufacturing IS are detailed through UML class diagrams. Moreover, to better grasp these contributions its similarities and differences with the B-SCP are outlined. 1 INTRODUCTION In today highly competitive environment, information systems (IS) and related information technologies (IT) have become real competitive weapons. In this boarder, the IS alignment is crucial. In (Camponovo, 2004) it is suggested to study the IS alignment not only from the strategic alignment point of view, but to add two other levels enabling to achieve a global and complete alignment of the IS. The three proposed levels are the following: • Alignment with the strategy (or strategic alignment): it focuses on aligning IS strategy to business strategy. • Alignment with the environment: it concerns the alignment of the IS with the actors involved, their needs, uses, issues. • Alignment with uncertain evolution: evolutions of the strategy and of the environment would require the IS to be aligned repeatedly. This level tends to incorporate, in the IS, features to cope with these evolutions. As it is exposed in (Goepp, 2006), the alignment of manufacturing IS is complex. manufacturing facilities. Research in the strategic alignment field focuses mainly on the management issues by proposing theoretical frameworks. For example the framework proposed in (Polallis, 2003) provides a co-alignment model and a set of guidelines for theory building of IS and business practice aspects of IS. This kind of framework concerns managers and is difficult to put into action with the stakeholders involved in the development of manufacturing IS. Other researches like the B-SCP approach described in (Bleistein, 2006) suggests to operationalize strategic alignment frameworks by coupling them to a requirement engineering (RE) framework. B-SCP integrates the three themes strategy, context and process using a RE notation for each theme. This goal-driven approach enables to outline the business process elements, which are “critical” for the evolution. Here, the consistency between requirements and strategy is checked at a given moment. The alignment with uncertain evolution is not tackled. The complete application of B-SCP requires to work out a detailed business process model, a complete i* goal model, and a study of their interactions. In (Goepp, 2006) it is shown that, for manufacturing IS, the drawbacks linked to the difficulty for domain experts to deal with the fuzzy 521 Goepp V. and Kiefer F. (2007). KEY-PROBLEMS AND MULTI-SCREEN VIEW - A Framework to Perform the Aligment of Manufacturing IS. In Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems - ISAS, pages 521-524 DOI: 10.5220/0002366705210524 Copyright c  SciTePress