Business-IT Strategic Alignment Focused on Social and Technical Dimensions

Achieving business-IT alignment is one of the main purposes and also challenges of organizations. Many studies have indicated the importance of aligning information systems (IS) function with other business functions. The main purpose of this survey is evaluating business-IT alignment focusing on social and technical dimensions of business-IT alignment in Bank Mellat. The data was collected through a questionnaire which was designed based on Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) and also the models provided by Reich and Benbasat (2000), and Lee et al. (2008). By using three questionnaires, the status of social and technical dimensions of business-IT alignment has been investigated under 3 groups of questions: (a) Business-IT strategic planning alignment; (b) Business-IT processes, organization and relationships, and (c) Managing IT human resources and training users. The collected data was analyzed by applying onetailed T-Test, ANOVA and Tukey-Kramer post- test. The results of analysis show that the status of all technical indicators was at ‘Defined’ stage, while there was some weakness in social dimension of business-IT alignment. Also, the overall results show that the status of business-IT alignment regarding all of the three mentioned dimensions is at ‘Defined’ stage. A comparative analysis of the results that has focused on the perceptions of different sample respondent groups show significant differences between the perceptions of external auditors who believe in ‘Repeatable’ level of business-IT alignment and other respondent groups who believe in ‘Defined’ level of business-IT alignment toward all three mentioned dimensions.