In recent years, the automation of business processes has become one of the most prominent and promising uses of Web service technology. Consequently several languages have been created for the execution of business processes, making it possible to define new and more complex services or business processes which are implemented for example by means of Web service composition. Nevertheless, these kinds of languages are not suitable for use in the early stages of the development process of information systems. Special methodologies or techniques are therefore necessary to allow systems analysts to understand services from a business point of view, while facilitating the design and development of Web service composition. In this paper, we present a service-oriented approach to information system development that starts by identifying, through business modeling, the services required by the customers of a business, to make it possible to create a Web service composition model. This model will facilitate the transformation to specific languages for business process execution, thereby reducing the development efforts made in service-oriented applications. The method proposed is illustrated by means of a Web application for the management of medical images, which we have taken as a case study.

This paper presents a framework for architecture alignment that can be positioned between approaches for software architecture, which concern software artefacts only, and strategic alignment models, which have a business focus. The framework is currently applied in case study research to find alignment patterns used in practice. First results presented in this paper indicate that the framework might yield an operationalization of strategic architecture alignment models. We also present an alignment pattern which shows a difference between how architectures are designed at the application level and the infrastructure level. We think this difference is significant for practical alignment models.