Towards the Model Driven Organization

Modern organizations are faced with the need to rapidly respond to frequent changes arising from external business pressures. The effect of such continuous evolution eventually leads to organizational misalignment, that is, situations in which sub-optimal configurations of underlying systems significantly reduce an organization's ability to meet its strategic goals. Ensuring alignment of an organization's systems and its goals has been a concern of researchers and practitioners in the enterprise architecture (EA) domain. Unfortunately, current approaches do not adequately address alignment problems that modern organizations face. In this paper we propose that alignment concerns can be better addressed by making models the primary entities that stakeholders within and outside of an organization use to interact with the organization. We call an organization that maintains and uses an integrated set of models to manage alignment concerns a Model Driven Organization (MDO). In this paper we characterize the alignment problem, discuss the shortcomings of current alignment management approaches and present our MDO vision.