Strategic alignment of business processes

Strategic business process alignment is the practice of correlating business processes to organisational strategy, addressing problems within organisations where processes are misaligned. A business may have processes that do not contribute towards their organisational strategies. Additionally, there may be organisational strategies that are unfulfilled as there are no processes within the business that can satisfy them. Through process composition and assessing strategic alignment, businesses can ensure that all components of the organisation work towards the core goals and the company vision. The motivation of this thesis stems from a lack of formal understanding of the subject. To develop and define concept of alignment in the space of organisational strategy, this dissertation explores the nature of strategy, business process management & composition, integration, compliance and, goal realization. It then provides deep analysis on how these fields can be connected to create a general method for alignment. This thesis seeks to develop a methodological framework and supporting toolkit to provide a measurable assessment of alignment between a portfolio of business processes and the strategic landscape of an organisation. This can be further used to establish re-alignment in a dynamic enterprise context. A suite of tools (TextSeer) as well as a method to assess strategic alignment has been designed and developed through this thesis. These tools enable businesses to better understand their operations. This understanding allows an organisation to manage their processes more efficiently with clear process descriptions and process to strategy mappings. The thesis aids in the modeling and management of processes and business strategies by relating each process within an organisation to related organisational strategies.