Mixed results in strategic IT alignment research: a synthesis and empirical study

Abstract

The alignment of business strategy and IT has been a top managerial concern for decades. Yet despite much investigation, the effect of strategic IT alignment on organizational performance remains unclear, with mixed results reported in the literature. The purpose of this paper is to advance our understanding of mixed findings in IT alignment research. We first examine inconsistent findings reported in two streams of alignment research: the traditional firm-level IT alignment literature and the emerging literature into process-level IT alignment. We then empirically investigate whether firm- and process-level conceptualizations of IT alignment lead to different conclusions about the effect of alignment on performance. Using data from a survey of 120 firms, we show that firm-level IT alignment and process-level IT alignment yield different conclusions when testing the same theory under the same conditions. We also show that differences in firms’ strategic orientations can help explain these results. This research provides evidence that firm- and process-level conceptualizations of IT alignment are not interchangeable and that the choice of conceptualization can mean the difference between accepting and rejecting a theory.