What is Type

The proverbial communication gap between business and IT experts is mostly due to the fact that what is considered obvious to some business experts might not be obvious or even known to IT experts, and might substantially differ from what is considered obvious to other business experts. Thus, different stakeholders may understand the business domain and problems in tacit and quite different ways, and at the same time might be unaware of these differences. This leads to business-IT misalignment, and therefore to many serious information system failures, from life-threatening to financial or simply very annoying (loss of customers’ trust and patience). The article provides a concise overview of the topic, includes definitions of some essential concepts and constructs together with industrial examples of their use in modeling and in fostering business-IT alignment, and shows how a small subset of UML has been successfully used to represent the essential structure of a model.