Business IT Alignment - Status Quo on a Survey Amongst Top It Managers in German Speaking Countries: A Replication Study

Abstract

This research-in-progress paper describes how Companies and especially IT Organizations manage the Business-IT-Alignment between the Management including its Top Management Team and the Chief Information Officer (CIO). This is necessary as near to all companies are part of aworld where volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity (VUCA) drive the constant adaption of Business strategy, business models, and Technology to stay either ahead of the competition or at least be able to compete head to head with the other market players. The CIO whose Role more and more is described as an executive one, rather than an operative one, needs to drive this process actively. The Scope of this research are bigger companies in the German-speaking DACH (Germany, Austria, and Switzerland) region from all industries. Excluded from the survey were state agencies. As the survey was purposely only offered in German language, a referral to other countries has been prevented. Purpose: To give interested practitioners and researchers an overview over the status quo. Additionally the outcome will be used to design research models for further analysis. Methodology: Based on data acquired in an online survey in the German-speaking DACH region, methods of descriptive statistics have been used to visualize the nature of the results. The results of this research are based on 168 individuals which held the position of a top IT manager. Results and conclusions: This paper gives a structured overview of key figures regarding IT Organization’s setup, CIO’s strategic work, and Business-IT-Alignment. The data suggest that IT organizations today are on the same level as other operational business processes and that CIOs are fully accepted as part of the top management team. This results in the fact that business IT alignment leads to the situation that most companies report that the IT architecture supports the business strategy very well. Yet, the participants report that their involvement in the development of the company strategy is average, which might cause issues in the future as new digitally enabled business models are more and more needed in a VUCA environment.