An Empirical Study on Business/ICT Alignment in European Organisations

The information and communication technology (ICT) literature has demonstrated that alignment between business and ICT has a positive effect on business performance and effectiveness. This study builds on these results, complemented with some theoretical foundations of the firm, to argue that Business/ICT alignment can be the basis of a sustainable competitive advantage for organisations. To do so, we first evaluate how well-aligned European organisation really are. We report on the results of a survey1 carried out in Belgium, France, Germany, United Kingdom, The Netherlands, Italy and Spain. More than 640 valid responses were analysed. The goal of the study is twofold: to analyse context dependency of business/ICT alignment and to deduce some practical guidelines for managers in the field. Two important results are discussed: First, we demonstrate the influence of different ICT strategies on alignment performance. Next, we describe how organisations which establish specific ICT management routines obtain, on average, better alignment performance scores.