Business and IT alignment in context

Abstract

Already for more than two decades, the necessity and desirability of aligning business needs and information technology (IT) capabilities is considered to be one of the key issues in IT management. However, several studies report quite low scores on business and IT alignment (BIA). The question “Why haven’t we mastered alignment?” remains valid today, both from an academic and from a practical perspective. Based upon our analysis of the reasons why alignment continues to be a challenge for many organizations, we concluded that organizational or situational circumstances influence alignment, and that these influences are not adequately addressed in the available models and frameworks of BIA. Several researches therefore call upon the academic community to take a contingency perspective in further studies on alignment. It is for this reason that we take on a contingency perspective on BIA in the studies in this dissertation. In order to explore and understand the influence of situational factors, the main research question of this dissertation is formulated as follows: How do situational factors influence business and IT alignment maturity? This research question was explored in coordinate studies, that each highlighted how a specific situational factor related to alignment. The situational factors we studied were IT outsourcing, strategic orientation, organizational culture and national culture on alignment. Based on these coordinate studies we can now conclude that Business and IT alignment is a situational phenomenon. Existing conceptualizations, models and studies provide guiding insights for developing or achieving alignment in specific organizations, but they do not provide a prescriptive recipe for success. The studies reported in this dissertation, showed that different situational factors do influence an organization’s maturity, and thereby its capability, to align business and IT. In some studies, the situational factor showed an overall effect on BIA maturity, however, how this influence exactly effected alignment, required a detailed analysis of relationships between the aspects of the situational factor considered, and the variables of BIA maturity. It appeared that different situational factors have different aspects and antecedents, that influence different variables of alignment, thereby creating a complex ‘web’ of influences and effects. The studies, however, also showed that not all variables of alignment maturity are effected equally by the situational factors. An overall observation that can be made from the influences that were found in our studies, is that the situational factors seem to effect the ‘organizational’ variables of alignment maturity most. Organizational variables typically include Governance, Skills and Value measurement. Also the variable Communications partly includes organizable aspects such as structures and processes that liaise between business and IT. A more intangible or ‘softer’ variable, most prominently Partnership, but also the ‘shared understanding’ aspect of the variable Communications, seems to be less directly influenced by situational factors. The observation that the ‘softer’ variables of alignment maturity seem to be less prone to situational influences, brings us to the conclusion that business – IT partnership is key to alignment, in all situational settings