Antecedents Factors Affecting Alignment and Its Impact to Organizational Performance in Universities

Abstract

Business and Information Technology (IT) alignment involves applying IT in an appropriate and timely way, in harmony with business strategies, goals and needs. Prior research argues that achieving alignment contributes immensely to ensuring that IT investments improve organisational performance. One important issue in business–IT alignment study is the absence of alignment. Findings indicate that there are many factors/variables that consistently enhance business-IT alignment. By identifying factors to achieve business-IT alignment, the problem on the absence of alignment could be addressed. Due to the complexity of business-IT alignment, there is possibility that successful alignment focuses on managing specific alignment dimension by investigating factors that encourage particular dimension. Past studies have shown the relationship between business-IT alignment and organizational performance. However, only few researchers tried to relate between the factors with organizational performance. Literature on alignment discovered that there seems to be confusion in clarifying the business-IT alignment concept. Based on this gap, this paper examines problem and issues on alignment, identify, analyze and discuss factors affecting alignment, then categorize the constructs identified into dimensions and propose a model for alignment in universities. The study contributes to the formation of a theoretical model influencing alignment dimension that has impact on organizational performance. The model is important to provide empirical evidence that confirms the importance of categorizing factors into dimensions in achieving business-IT alignment and their influence on universities’ performance.