A Philosophical Foundation for Business and IT Alignment in Enterprise Architecture with the Example of SEAM

Business-IT alignment is complicated because of the need to align multiple business and IT points of view. A philosophical foundation can help generate methods that bring together these disparate viewpoints in a common model that all stakeholders can agree to. In this paper, we describe the philosophical foundations of the Systemic Enterprise Architecture Method (SEAM) and show how it can help business-IT alignment with the example of a concrete business process. These foundations are applicable to other methods as well.