In the VITAL project, we investigate the problem of aligning the services offered by networked ICT with the requirements of networked businesses. In businesses of any significant size, business-ICT alignment is a hard problem, which is currently not solved completely. With the advent of network organizations, the problem gets a new dimension, because in a network, there is not a single decision point about ICT support and different actors in a network may have conflicting requirements. Networks exist when different businesses decide to cooperate by means of ICT networks, but they also exist in large corporations, which often consist of nearly independent business units.

In VITAL, we investigate an economic value-based approach to alignment in networked businesses. The project consists of three parts. All three parts build upon the in e3value method and on ICT architecture design research done in the GRAAL program.

• VITAL/services. We will develop techniques to describe ICT services as economic value objects from a consumer (i.e. business) perspective and investigate ways to match these services in a value-oriented way with ICT services described from a supplier (i.e. ICT) perspective.
• VITAL/design. We will develop techniques to design networked ICT architecture that supports services required by the business, taking the value offered by those services, and the costs incurred by the architecture, into account.
• VITAL/maturity. We will develop models of decision processes about ICT services and their architecture, and develop maturity models of those processes.

In all three subprojects we do case study research and action research. All three VITAL projects will start in 2005 and have a duration of four years.

VITAL is a cooperation between the Information Systems Group of the University of Twente and the Business Informatics Section of the Free University of Amsterdam.

VITAL is sponsored by the Jacquard program of the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research NWO.