Business-ICT alignment can be reached and done at various levels of maturity. There have been some proposals for architecture alignment maturity models, but these are oriented to single businesses and do not incorporate the value viewpoint. In this subproject, we study architecture processes in networked businesses and develop a maturity model for this that incorporates the value viewpoint. We want to answer the following questions.

• Which decision processes take place in networked businesses when allocating services to a distributed ICT architecture?
• How can we use value-based specification and allocation techniques in these processes?
• What is the relationship between these processes and known maturity models such as CMMI, the IT Service CMM and the REAIMS maturity model?
• How can maturity levels for architecture management be defined?
• What process areas are needed at each level?

Except for the question how to use value-based decision techniques, these questions are empirical, not normative, and we will investigate them by means of case study research. The normative question how to use value-based specification and allocation techniques in these processes will be studied by simulated case studies, i.e. by showing how these techniques could have been used in the cases that we study. With our business partners we will identify user organizations where we can study the structure of architecture design processes.