Evaluating the Impact of the Covid-19 Pandemic on the Strategic Alignment Competences of Organizations: A Case Study in Logistics

Abstract

The strategic alignment tenets describe the generic processes/mechanisms for the Information Technology (IT) domain to be impactful to the ascertainment of business strategies within organizations. However, an in-depth reassessment of the level of integration between the organizational IT approach and the business convolutions needs to be performed in times of crisis such as the recent Covid-19 pandemic. For this reason, the present research aims to explore the impact of the pandemic on the state of strategic alignment maturity within the logistics sector. To this end, the Strategic Alignment Maturity Model (SAMM), composed by Luftman, was used to measure the pre-, and post-pandemic strategic alignment maturity levels in four production and distribution facilities in Belgium. This model was chosen due to its capacity to assign strategic alignment maturity scores in a wide spectrum of individual alignment dimensions. For the application of the SAMM, we performed semi-structured interviews to determine an overall strategic alignment maturity score for each company, for the stages before, and after the outset of the pandemic. Despite some fluctuations amongst the companies’ alignment maturity trends between the two stages, our results suggest an aggregate increase in the average alignment maturity level for all the surveyed companies after the start of the pandemic.