Towards the business–information technology alignment in cloud computing environment: anapproach based on collaboration points and agents

Abstract

With the development of extended enterprise and information technologies (IT), a new business pattern with its infrastructure, cloud computing, is emerging. More and more small and medium enterprises do not implement significant parts of their information systems (IS) in-house. Instead, they prefer to use the software services and even infrastructure services provided by professional information service companies. Their business strategy, IT strategy, business processes and information technologies shall be re-aligned. Furthermore, no cloud computing service vendor can satisfy the complete functional information system requirements of an enterprise. Sometimes, enterprises have to simultaneously use software services distributed in different clouds in conjunction with their intra-IS. These bring great challenges for business–IT alignment of an enterprise in the cloud computing environment (CCE). This study reviews business–IT alignment problems and models in CCE. The concept of collaboration point (CP) is proposed, and a CP-based business processes collaboration modelling technique is developed to improve the feasibility of IS in CCE. A framework to integrate applications and services deployed in public clouds and intra-IS is designed and a run-time platform with the collaboration agent technique is developed to realise the concept of CP. The case study illustrates the implementation of techniques developed in this article.

Keywords:

• business–IT alignment
• collaboration point
• cloud computing
• system integration

Acknowledgements

This work is sponsored by the China High-Tech 863 Program, No. 2001AA415340 and No. 2007AA04Z1A6, the Beijing Natural Science Foundation, No. 9072007, China/Ireland Cooperation Foundation, and Tsinghua Asian Research Centre 2010 Youth Project C1.