Mini track: creating business value through business-IT alignment, shared knowledge, commitment and accountability

Abstract

Responsibility for realizing the benefits of IT investments and the success of these benefits is not just the responsibility of the IT organization. An IT project can be completed perfectly, ontime, and on-budget, and still fail to succeed and realize the intended business benefits that justified initial the investment. True IT benefits realization and investment return only occurs when Business Units and IT work as partners with shared knowledge, joint commitment, and shared accountability for the success or failure for the project. Benefits also occur when they are measured, calling for jointly agreed on measures of success that are actually demonstrated at the end of an IT project. The IT literature contains a great deal of knowledge on IT-Business alignment and shared knowledge, but is “light” on shared commitment and accountability, especially when tied to actual benefits realization (dependent variables). This Mini-track showcases theoretically sound and ground-breaking research that reflects, interprets, and leads the realities of IT organizations as an integral part of businesses. The seven research papers included in this Mini-track provide a broad array of topics that explore how business value is created. The results as well as the conclusions that the authors draw are intriguing and will help provide a greater understanding of issues surrounding how IT is aligned with business strategies. Likewise, the results suggest that when there exists shared knowledge, joint commitment, and shared accountability between business and IT leaders, alignment provides IT-enabled results for the overall business. In addition, the expansion of theoretical models into industry specific terms provides additional contributions for academics and industry practitioners. Proceedings of the 37th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences 2004