A framework for the identification of reusable processes

A significant challenge that faces IT management is that of aligning the IT infrastructure of an enterprise with its business goals and practices, also called business-IT alignment. A particular business-IT alignment approach, the foundation for execution approach, was well-accepted by practitioners due to a novel construct, called the operating model (OM). The OM supports business-IT alignment by directing the coherent and consistent design of business and IT components. Even though the OM is a popular construct, our previous research detected the need to enhance the OM, since the OM does not specify methods to identify opportunities for data sharing and process reuse in an enterprise. In this article, we address one of the identified deficiencies in the OM. We present a process reuse identification framework (PRIF) that could be used to enhance the OM in identifying process reuse opportunities in an enterprise. We applied design research to develop PRIF as an artefact, where the development process of PRIF was facilitated by means of the business-IT alignment model (BIAM). We demonstrate the use of the PRIF as well as report on the results of evaluating PRIF in terms of its usefulness and ease-of-use, using experimentation and a questionnaire.