Organizations are today becoming more and more dependent on their information systems and other kinds of IT-based support systems to realise their business strategies, building value networks with partners, and manging their resources effectively. But how can organizations ensure that their IT investments are well aligned with the needs of the business? A number of frameworks and methods have been designed to help managers in aligning business and IT. Such alignment is a critical “early stage” activity to understand how information systems contribute to business strategy and to set directions for the development and maintenance processes that follow. Recently, novel methods and techniques based on conceptual and  enterprise modeling have been proposed to support mutual alignment between business needs and IT solutions.  BUSITAL'08 is a forum for practitioners and researchers that want to  explore the benefits, challenges and solutions of business and IT alignment.

BUSITAL'08 will take place on June 16, 2008, in Montpellier in conjunction with the CAiSE'08 conference.

The BUSITAL Workshop series was initiated by the EU FP6 INTEROP-Interoperability Research for Networked Enterprises Applications and Software. INTEROP was a Network of Excellence shared by more than 150 researchers on the topics related to: Ontology to identify interoperability semantics in enterprises, Enterprise Modeling to define interoperability requirements and models; and Architectures and Enabling technologies to provide implementation frameworks. This community has identified challenges in aligning business and IT infrastructures as a key factor to the productivity of the modern enterprise as well as the management of its agile evolution.