Analysis of IT/Business Alignment Situations as a Precondition for the Design and Engineering of Situated IT/Business Alignment Solutions

Author

Saat, Jan ; Winter, Robert ; Franke, Ulrik ; Lagerström, Robert ; Ekstedt, Mathias

Author_Institution

Inst. of Inf. Manage., Univ. of St. Gallen, St. Gallen, Switzerland

fYear

2011

fDate

4-7 Jan. 2011

Firstpage

1

Lastpage

9

Abstract

IT/business alignment has constantly been among the top priorities for IT executives. From a prescriptive, design research perspective, our analysis of related work shows that neither is IT/business alignment sufficiently specified to allow systematic artifact construction, nor are existing approaches situational to reflect the diversity of IT/business alignment problems in the real world. We use goal decomposition to characterize IT/business alignment by qualities from (i) the IT systems, (ii) the business, and (iii) the IT governance perspective. A survey-based exploratory study among 174 professionals from various European countries is conducted that helps to identify four distinct IT/business alignment situations. This knowledge can now be used to construct methods and models that do not only operationalize alignment, but also can be adapted to the different situational needs.

Keywords

DP management; IT alignment situation; IT executives; IT governance perspective; IT systems perspective; business alignment situation; business perspective; design research perspective; goal decomposition; Adaptation model; Availability; Companies; Computer architecture; Industries;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

System Sciences (HICSS), 2011 44th Hawaii International Conference on

Conference_Location

Kauai, HI

ISSN

1530-1605

Print_ISBN

978-1-4244-9618-1

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/HICSS.2011.63

Filename

5718968