ALBIS: ALigning Business Processes and Information Systems – Software Environment and Case Studies

The evaluation of the alignment level existing between a business process and the supporting software systems is a critical concern for an organization, as the higher the alignment level is, the better the process performance is. Monitoring the alignment implies the characterization of all the items it involves and definition of measures for evaluating it. This is a complex task, and the availability of automatic tools for supporting evaluation and evolution activities may be precious. This chapter presents the ALBIS Environment (Aligning Business Processes and Information Systems), designed to support software maintenance tasks. In particular, the proposed environment allows the modeling and tracing between business and software entities and the measurement of their alignment degree. An information retrieval approach is embedded in ALBIS based on two processing phases including syntactic and semantic analysis. The usefulness of the environment is discussed through two case studies.