Enhancing Business-IT Alignment in Cloud-Based Organizations: A Conceptual Framework and Model-Driven Alignment Perspective

Abstract

The increasing adoption of cloud computing and digital transformation initiatives has intensified the need for effective alignment between business objectives and information technology capabilities. While Business Process as a Service (BPaaS) has emerged as a promising paradigm for integrating business process management with cloud environments, existing Business-IT Alignment approaches remain limited in terms of adaptability, formalization, and decision support. Most current frameworks focus primarily on connecting business processes to cloud services without providing a comprehensive perspective that ensures traceability between business requirements and cloud resource configurations. This paper proposes a conceptual framework for enhancing Business-IT Alignment in cloud-based organizations. Building upon the CloudSocket architecture, the proposed framework integrates Business Process Management principles, semantic alignment mechanisms, process mining concepts, event-log exploitation, and a dedicated Decision Support Layer. In addition, a model-driven alignment perspective is introduced to ensure consistency and traceability between business objectives, process models, and cloud service configurations. Unlike existing approaches, our proposed framework adopts a holistic view of the alignment lifecycle, covering business process design, resource allocation, execution, monitoring, and continuous improvement. The framework aims to facilitate informed decision-making, improve organizational agility, and support the dynamic adaptation of cloud resources to evolving business requirements. In this paper, we position our proposed framework against existing alignment approaches and examine it through a model-driven perspective that strengthens traceability between business objectives, process models, and cloud service configurations. This study contributes to the advancement of Business-IT Alignment research by providing an extensible conceptual framework that supports consistency, adaptability, and informed decision-making throughout the digital transformation lifecycle of cloud-based organizations.