Enterprise Modeling Facilitating Business and IT Alignment Along the Social Dimension: Stakeholder Intentions for Model-Based Communication and Coordination

Business -- IT alignment calls for coordination between IT and business (non-IT) parts of an organization along different dimensions: strategic, structural, social, and cultural. The focus of this conceptual paper is on the social dimension of alignment -- the mutual understanding of business and IT stakeholders on the business and IT objectives and activities. In the face of an increasingly complex strategic context, growing coordination needs must be matched with respective coordination capabilities. We argue that business -- IT alignment at different organizational levels and for different stakeholders requires qualitatively different coordination capabilities, which pose distinct demands for the use of enterprise models. Using 4EM as an example, we investigate how enterprise models support these coordination capabilities as well as which intentions different IT and non-IT stakeholders have for enterprise modeling at different organizational levels.