Using the RUP/UML Business Use Case Model for Service Development Governance: A Business and IT Alignment Based Approach

The practice of Service Development Governance (SDG) has been poorly investigated in literature. IT governance professional frameworks essentially furnish guidelines for decision making but do not provide tools to model the IT department's offer as loosely coupled (business IT) services supporting specific business processes. The investment decision for the development of services supporting a significant part of a company's business processes remains a governance decision that should be supported by specific indicators combining long-term business vision and domain knowledge. Strategic benefits are often difficult to define and evaluate. In this paper, we overview a SDG process based on the elements of the RUP/UML business use-case model. The process is aimed to evaluate Business and IT Alignment (BITA) of re-engineered business IT services. It is structured around the 3 classical stages of IT governance: Evaluate, Direct and Monitor and validated on a case study in collaborative outbound logistics.