A comparison of the views of business and IT management on success factors for strategic alignment

This paper reports on a study to determine whether there are any significant differences in perspectives of IT and business managers on what factors contribute to successful strategic alignment using Henderson and Venkatraman’s strategic alignment model as its framework. A general survey was undertaken over a range of industries and results indicated that the two perspectives were largely equivalent, except for their overall perception of the factors that contributed to success in strategic alignment. However, detailed case studies on container terminal operators showed very different patterns; this suggested that successful alignment of IT in industries which are highly IT-dependent would require very different perspectives of both IT and business managers although these are still convergent within the organisation.