business-IT Alignment Research Articles

Networked Business Process Management

In the current economy, a shift can be seen from stand-alone business organizations to networks of tightly collaborating business organizations. To allow this tight collaboration, business process management in these collaborative networks is becoming increasingly important. This paper discusses automated support for this networked business process management: automated means to manage business processes that span multiple autonomous organizations. The author starts this paper with a treatment of intra- and inter-organizational business processes to provide a conceptual background for business process management in business networks. The author describes a number of research approaches in this area, including the context of these approaches and the architectures of the automated systems proposed by them. The approaches are described from early developments in the field relying on dedicated technology to current designs based on standardized technology in a service-oriented context. The paper thereby provides an overview of developments in the area of inter-organizational business process management in the spectrum from simple, static business networks to complex, dynamic networks. The author observes that the described BPM research efforts move from pushing new BPM technology into application domains to using BPM to realize business-IT alignment in complex application contexts.

A Study on the Effects for IT Innovation, IT Dependency and Enterprise Architecture Usage on IT-Business Alignment

A Study on the Effects for IT Innovation, IT Dependency and Enterprise Architecture Usage on IT-Business Alignment

The Impact of SOA Implementation on IT-Business Alignment

With firms facing intense rivalry, globalization, and time-to-market pressures, the need for organizational agility assumes greater importance. One of the primary vehicles for achieving organizational agility is the use of agile information systems [IS] and the close alignment of information technologies [IT] with business. However, IS is often viewed as an impediment to organization agility. Recently, service-oriented architecture [SOA] has emerged as a prominent IS agility-enhancing technology. The fundamental question of how SOA can enhance organization agility and foster closer alignment between IT and business has not been adequately addressed. The dynamic interaction among external business environmental factors, organizational agility, and IS architecture makes the process of keeping IT and business aligned more complex. This study uses a design science approach to build a system dynamics model to examine the effect of employing alternative SOA implementation strategies in various organizational and external business environments on the IT business alignment and IS cost. The results provide insights into the shaping of IT-business alignment. Additionally, the system dynamics model serves as a tool for supporting managerial decisions related to SOA implementation.

A Systematic Review of Business and Information Technology Alignment

Business organizations have become heavily dependent on information technology (IT) services. The process of alignment is defined as the mutual synchronization of business goals and IT services. However, achieving mature alignment between business and IT is difficult due to the rapid changes in the business and IT environments. This article provides a systematic review of studies on the alignment of business and IT. The research articles reviewed are based on topics of alignment, the definition of alignment, history, alignment challenges, phases of alignment, alignment measurement approaches, the importance of alignment in business industries, how software engineering helps in better alignment, and the role of the business environment in aligning business with IT. It aims to present a thorough understanding of business-IT alignment and to provide a list of future research directions regarding alignment. To perform the systematic review, we used the guidelines developed by Kitchenham for reviewing the available research papers relevant to our topic.

A Model for Business-IT Alignment in Malaysian Public Universities

Business-IT alignment is defined as a stage where the mission, objective, and planning within business strategy is shared and supported by IT strategy. This definition is extended to cover the situation where business executive and IT executive comprehended and committed towards achieving the mission, objective, and plan for both business and IT. One important issue in business–IT alignment study is the absence of 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 organisation performance. However, only few researchers tried to relate between the factors with organisational performance. Therefore, the aim of this research is to contribute to the formation of a theoretical model influencing alignment dimension that has impact on organisational 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.

On Engineering Cloud Applications - State of the Art, Shortcomings Analysis, and Approach

Recently, Cloud Computing has become an emerging research topic in response to the shift from product-oriented economy to service-oriented economy and the move from focusing on software/system development to addressing business-IT alignment. From the IT perspectives, there is a proliferation of methods for cloud application development. Such methods have clearly shown considerable shortcomings to provide an efficient solution to deal with major aspects related to cloud applications. One of these major aspects is the multi-tenancy of the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) components used to compose Service-Based Applications (SBAs) on the cloud. Current SaaS offerings are often provided as monolithic one-size-fits-all solutions and give little or no opportunity for further customization. Monolithic SaaS offerings are more likely to show failure in meeting the business requirements of several consumers. In this paper, we analyze the state-of-the-art of the standardization, methodology, software and product support for SBA development on the cloud, identify some shortcomings, and point out the need of a novel approach for breaking down the monolithic stack of cloud service offerings and providing an effective and flexible solution for SBA designers to select, customize, and aggregate cloud service offerings coming from different providers (25)

IT-Business Alignment in a 21st Century Corporation

This article describes the main Enterprise Architecture Controls that are required for a modern 21st Century Corporation to align its IT systems to its business functions to operate effectively, such as: enterprise architecture framework, business operating model of the organization, business process narratives, enterprise architecture repository, management plan for designing and implementing an enterprise architecture framework and enterprise architecture development roles.

Strategic Business-IT alignment of application software packages: Bridging the Information Technology gap

An application software package implementation is a complex endeavour, and as such it requires the proper understanding, evaluation and redefining of the current business processes to ensure that the implementation delivers on the objectives set at the start of the project. 
 Numerous factors exist that may contribute to the unsuccessful implementation of application software packages. However, the most significant contributor to the failure of an application software package implementation lies in the misalignment of the organisation’s business processes with the functionality of the application software package. Misalignment is attributed to a gap that exists between the business processes of an organisation and what functionality the application software package has to offer to translate the business processes of an organisation into digital form when implementing and configuring an application software package. This gap is commonly referred to as the information technology (IT) gap.
 This study proposes to define and discuss the IT gap. Furthermore this study will make recommendations for aligning the business processes with the functionality of the application software package (addressing the IT gap). The end result of adopting these recommendations will be more successful application software package implementations.

A Context and Content Reflection on Business-IT Alignment Research

In this paper, the authors present the results of a recently performed literature analysis on the topic of Business-IT Alignment. They have thereby investigated 270 articles from the period 1993-2011 in a structured way. The articles were selected on the basis of three well-known ranking lists of publications in the Information Systems research domain. In the authors’ analysis they distinguish a context and a content point of view. The former one focuses on metadata analysis of the articles under consideration whereas the latter one uses text mining techniques to dive into the articles´ body of content. Finally, they discuss their results and present conceivable future research directions that should be tackled by alignment researchers and conclude their paper.

The impact of IT-business strategic alignment on firm performance in a developing country setting: exploring moderating roles of environmental uncertainty and strategic orientation

Aligning information technology (IT) strategy with business strategy has been one of the top concerns of practitioners and scholars for decades. Although numerous studies have documented positive effects of IT-business alignment on organizational performance, our knowledge about this relationship is still limited due to the complexity of contingent factors. The extant literature is largely based on research in the context of developed countries and few studies have explicitly considered the effects of contextual factors such as market environment and competitive strategy on this relationship. In this study, we attempt to fill these gaps by testing the alignment–performance relationship in a developing country setting and investigating the moderating roles of environmental uncertainty and strategic orientation on the performance effects of strategic alignment using survey data collected in Turkey. Our analyses show that this positive effect is statistically significant in highly uncertain environments and varies across performance measures. Our results also show that the strategic alignment between IT and business has a significant impact on performance across all choices of strategic orientation – defender, prospector, or analyzer. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed and future research directions are explored.

State of ICT-Business Alignment

Considering the dynamic nature of ICT and its contribution to business growth and prospects which later translate to national development and prosperity, the aim of this research was threefold; study and examine ICT-business alignment cases in Zimbabwe, establish the current state of ICT-business alignment in the Zimbabwean business sector, and determine factors that have a propelling or frictional effect on alignment transition. The research results indicated that ICT and business executives in Zimbabwe appreciate that ICT contributes positively to business growth and sustainability of their organizations. However, the majority of these executives do not understand and apply the concept of IT-business alignment in their organizations. Another notable result was that to achieve alignment in a turbulent environment there are many factors that have a propelling or dragging effect on alignment. The factors have differing magnitude of effect on alignment as such a critical analysis of each factor is required.

Achieving Business and IT Alignment from Organisational Learning Perspectives

Business and IT alignment has continued as a top concern for business and IT executives for almost three decades. Many researchers have conducted empirical studies on the relationship between business-IT alignment and performance. Yet, these approaches, lacking a social perspective, have had little impact on sustaining performance and competitive advantage. In addition to the limited alignment literature that explores organisational learning that is represented in shared understanding, communication, cognitive maps and experiences. Hence, this paper proposes an integrated process that enables social and intellectual dimensions through the concept of organisational learning. In particular, the feedback and feed- forward process which provide a value creation across dynamic multilevel of learning. This mechanism enables on-going effectiveness through development of individuals, groups and organisations, which improves the quality of business and IT strategies and drives to performance.

Dependency-based IT Governance practices in inter-organisational collaborations: A graph-driven elaboration

In an ever more globalised world IT (Information Technology) managers increasingly have to support value creation within inter-organisational collaboration settings. Such organisational forms with their inherent complexity require specific approaches for their IT management within. Especially important for unleashing the chances of networked arrangements is the right form of IT Governance. Choosing the right arrangement for IT Governance is heavily dependent on understanding the concepts on which such business constellations are built. In this paper we provide therefore first a systematically derived, graph-based perspective on the key terms of inter-organisational collaboration. Based on this understanding of concepts and structured representations of inter-organisational dependencies we present interorganisational governance practices for IT. Specifically, we assign accountabilities to top executive roles from both IT and business. By keeping a holistic perspective, the insights gained in this study are highly relevant for strategic information management in terms of Business-IT Alignment as well as monitoring and controlling of inter-organisational information infrastructures in a rapidly changing business environment.

A two-stage analysis of the influences of employee alignment on effecting business–IT alignment

The influence of employee alignment orientations on successful implementation of business–IT alignment is investigated. Based on survey data collected from employees of Indonesian manufacturing companies, a two-stage approach is applied (i) to discover the connectivity relations among business–IT alignment and four aspects of employee alignment orientations, and then (ii) to measure the relative influence of each aspect onto one another. Employee communication is deemed to have the most direct contribution to business–IT alignment. Meanwhile, the connectivity relations show exactly how employee alignment orientations influence business–IT alignment.

Managing the it Alignment Gap in Turbulent Times — An Inside View

In this paper the CIO of a large shipping company describes the challenge of IT-alignment in turbulent years from 2004 to 2010. Our research questions are; how should the CIO relate to a dynamic alignment gap where the business environments are turbulent. How should the CIO understand and manage the IT alignment gap when there is a difference between the espoused and real business strategy? Our framework addresses the interplay of business strategy and IT alignment in four generic types. Through our longitudinal case we show how the framework allows for a deeper analysis of some fundamental challenges for the CIO in turbulent times. We argue that the CIO never should take the business strategy for granted, and we discuss implications for future research. We also present practical implications for the CIO, and a set of recommendations for business management on how to close the gap.

Business-IT Alignment in Collaborative Networked Organizations

Business-IT Alignment in Collaborative Networked Organizations

An Organizational Culture Perspective in Business-IT Alignment

Business-IT alignment (BITA) has gained attention during the last decade. As a result, a number of theoretical models that can be applied as supportive tools for assessing different components of BITA have been developed. However, most of these efforts have been produced in different countries and they ignore the factor that’s subjected to change due to cultural contexts. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of organizational culture on achieving BITA and influences its maturity. The research method and process follows the design science research and is done in three phases. First, an in-depth literature survey followed by a survey was carried out to identify and classify limitations of BITA attributes (based on Luftman’s strategic alignment maturity (SAM)) model and then, hypothesize the potential impact of organizational culture element (based on the Smit et al. model) on BITA attributes. Second, an empirical study is carried out to test the hypotheses in order to identify the limited BITA attributes based on organizational culture context. These attributes are further classified for proposing an extended version to the SAM model. Finally, the extended-SAM model is evaluated in 6 Swedish large and medium organizations to test its practicality for comparing its assessment with the assessment of the original SAM model.

Irish CIOs’ Influence on Technology Innovation and IT-Business Alignment

Irish CIOs’ Influence on Technology Innovation and IT-Business Alignment

About Our Authors

About Our Authors

The Business Value of IT: A Synthesis and Framework of Archival Research

ABSTRACTThis paper synthesizes recent empirical archival research investigating the link between information technology investment and business value. It examines (1) financial and nonfinancial measures to represent different elements of business value, (2) IT investment measures and links with firm performance, (3) IT and business complementarities that affect firm performance, and (4) the impact of business context and IT alignment with business strategy on resulting performance. The review of prior research is guided by a balanced scorecard framework that places IT in a business context and highlights the role of potential drivers and contextual factors that impact the association between IT and firm value. The paper concludes by proposing several broad avenues of future research that may be of particular interest to archival accounting information systems researchers.