Conceptual Modeling as a Tool for Corporate Governance Support: State of the Art and Research Agenda

Early days of information systems engineering saw practitioners implementing a software solution without proper analysis of the business processes, organizational environment and partnerships' context. Due to a tremendous failure rate, more and more effort has, over the years, been devoted to accurate domain analysis with the aim of representing the as-is and to-be organizational and data settings through conceptual models. The ability of conceptual models to exhaustively and adequately represent organizational setting behavior has hugely been enhanced through the use of goal-oriented modeling; the latter allows to represent stakeholders as well as their intentions and goals with realization scenarios. Such a tool nevertheless offers more potential than software development only. Researches have used conceptual models to sustain organization theory and represent strategic relationships among organizations in competition, cooperation and coopetition. Also, goal modeling allows to represent the long-term strategy as of a set of business objectives allowing to support reasoning for corporate and IT governance decisions. The paper overviews and investigates the use of conceptual modeling for strategic management to better understand the relationships among organizations, evaluate alternatives and estimate the consequences of IT governance decisions in terms of business and IT alignment. A research agenda is also provided.