Alignment of Business and IT and Its Association with Business Performance: The Case of Iranian Firms

Abstract

In recent years strategic alignment has become a hot topic and researchers have put strong effort to develop models and instruments in order to measure alignment. The significance and importance of the aligning business with information technology and its effects on business performance is clearly embedded in the existent literature. Unfortunately, very few works have been done among Iranian firms and competition environment of Iran. These researches are limited to some case studies in Iranian companies. So, this paper opens the gate on this topic by investigating the effects of strategic alignment of business and information technology on business performance in Iranian large companies, applying the famous model introduced by Chan et al.. The primary data collected from questionnaire collected from a long list of companies in Tehran Stock Exchange and were analyzed through using SPSS software. The results indicate that strategic alignment of IT and business strategy has a positive and significant effect on business performance and it is stronger than the effect of both business and IS strategic orientation. Finally, some suggestion for Iranian companies and also future researches are presented.