The problem of Business-IT alignment has been a challenge for organizations for more than two decades but it continues to remain a challenge with most organizations till today. This challenge exists due to the several reasons like the presence of varied stakeholder perspectives in the business, limited budget and limited resources. It gets further amplified by lack of integrated tools and methodologies which leads to restricted knowledge that inhibits traceability between business goals and operations. This limitation hampers our ability to make decisions that can add value to the business and lead to continuous improvement.
The thesis address this challenge through a real life case study within a complex city government organization by developing and validating a conceptual framework for systems analysis based on the characterization of an organization as an ‘Adaptive Complex Enterprise’(ACE). This framework addresses existing limitations by thinking about the problem by considering certain important dimensions in an organization, namely Business, Infrastructure, Operations, and Strategy stakeholders. This framework introduces a Requirements-Execution-Delivery (RED) model to characterize the transactions in an ACE. The contributions of this thesis are as follows: 1) Applying the framework for ACE to develop a Strategic Plan for the Information Technology department in a complex city organization. 2) Showing that the RED transaction-based methodology results in eliciting information about needed services/resources to sense and respond. 3) Showing that the transaction data can be captured and analyzed from organization source. 4) Prototyping a conceptual RED database serving as a way to integrate decision-making tools at the system or resource level.