A Framework to Analyse IS Alignment Approaches: Towards the Definition of Underlying Alignment Mechanisms

Today, companies are immersed in extremely competitive worldwide markets that change continuously. Thus, companies have to evolve introducing strategic and structural changes as a response to the external forces of the environment. This implies to consider the IS alignment from a global point of view integrating the classical “internal” strategic alignment with two other levels: the alignments with the environment and with uncertain evolutions. In this boarder, approaches that support and operationalise IS alignment are numerous but remain fuzzy towards the kind of alignment tackled. Therefore, it is proposed to build an analysis framework taking the global alignment problematic into account. It is composed of four elements and corresponding attributes detailing each aspect of alignment. This framework is applied to nine current alignment approaches in order to get a wide picture of the research in the domain. The corresponding analysis emphasises possible new work perspectives.