In the GRAAL program we investigate alignment between ICT architecture and business architecture. The program has a descriptive and a prescriptive goal.

• Its descriptive goal is to acquire knowledge about the the way alignment is maintained in companies.
• Its prescriptive goal is that we design new techniques to achieve and maintain alignment, and validate these techniques in a realistic manner.

We do case studies of alignment relations in companies and report about this confidentially to these companies. The results of case studies are included in anonymized form in scientific publications. We also apply our techniques in action research projects in companies. GRAAL started in the autumn on 2002. The results of the first two years of GRAAL have been summarized in a number of white papers.

The conceptual framework of GRAAL distinguishes several layers of service provision, starting from physical entities at the lowest layer, which provide services to the software infrastructure, which in turn provides services to business systems (applications and information systems), which in turn provide services to the business, which provides services to the business environment. Alignment relations exist across all these layers. There is a white paper about the conceptual framework in general and one about service provision layers.

GRAAL currently consists of the following projects.

• QUIDS (QUality Indicators in Design Spaces) investigates the effects of design decisions on software quality.
• VITAL (Value-based IT ALignment) investigates value-based techniques for designing a network of distributed ICT services and supporting business systems.
• COOP (Coordination Process Correctness and Trust Assumptions) investigates how a coordination process can be designed from a value model of a business cooperation, taking into account the different levels of trust that the business partners have in each other.
• Intermediation support for negotiation and alliance formation investigates how electronic intermediation services can be designed from a value model of intermediation.