Development of Ontology for Semantic Structure of Strategic Alignment Framework for IT Projects Combining PMBOK, PMI and VAL IT

Abstract

The objective of this paper is to provide an ontological overview of the semantically rich structure of best practice repositories for IT (Information Technology) project alignment. It emphasizes the importance of integrating IT management repositories with IT project management repositories to achieve high performance. It aims to present a semantic conceptual framework for IT project alignment that combines Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK), Project Management Institute (PMI's) risk management frameworks for improving project performance, and value from IT investment (VAL IT), which is an overarching framework for optimizing the business value of a project. We develop an ontology integrating these frameworks using the Ontology definition metamodel (ODM) approach. We use Unified Modeling Language (UML) for Resource Description Framework Schema (RDFS) representation to model the knowledge related to the principles of strategic alignment of IT projects and their interactions to visualize this field and give a relevant study, presented by an ontological model, that will serve the professionals of the domain as well as the researchers interested in the governance of information systems and IT project management. We continued the process of building our ontology from business objects based on our UML business model in order to populate a structured knowledge base that will be validated and shared in servers. We have also validated the consistency of the proposed ontology with the HermiT 1.4.3. 456 reasoning engine integrated in PROTÉGÉ 5 and we have also validated the structure of the proposed ontology with the OOPS! tool. The resulting ontology of this contribution is therefore validated by solid tools that allowed us to obtain a confirmed ontology. We confirm that the results of this contribution appear in the metrics of the resulting ontology which are summarized in the following data: 202 axioms (101: logical axiom count & 101: lexical axiom count), 64 Class count, 37 object property count, 26 subClassOf, 37 ObjectPropertyDomain and 38 ObjectPropertyRank. These results are inferred from the reasoning applied to the proposed ontology using the HermiT reasoner.