Aligning Multiple Definitions of Alignment--A Literature Review

Business/IT alignment is an important driver of IT-business value, thus, an important topic on researchers´ and practitioners´ agendas. Achieving alignment is a major goal of IT governance. Accordingly, many articles around alignment have been published. However, they describe a wide range of different sometimes overlapping alignment types. Yet, research depends on precise, unambiguous concepts. While previous reviews on alignment only list and describe alignment definitions, this literature-review-based research develops the Alignment Map, a structured overview of alignment types describing their relations to one another, and describes an approach to locate additional alignment definitions amongst existing ones. It is centred around the SAM whose two dimensions are complemented by a social dimension, highlighting the importance of social aspects in recent alignment literature. The Alignment Map, to my knowledge, is the first tool allowing researchers to locate their understanding of alignment amongst existing definitions, and thus promotes exchange between different alignment research streams.