A Critical Review of Luftman's Instrument for Business-IT Alignment

Business and Information Technology alignment remains one of the most important issues among IT managers. To assess it, many proposals have been put forward over the years. As one of the most cited in Google Scholar, the Luftman’s survey instrument emerges as a promising one to assess business-IT alignment. This work presents a critical review of the Luftman’s proposal for assessing business-IT alignment by comparing it with six other relevant proposals in the literature. Each one of the selected proposals was studied in terms of the coverage of the dimensions of the Luftman’s instrument: communications, competency/value measurements, governance, partnership, technology scope and skills. Governance was the dimension better covered followed by the technology scope but the remaining dimensions were not so well covered with the skills dimension being the worst one. In fact, none of the selected proposals showed up as complete as the Luftman’s proposal. Some research has already been carried out to validate and test the Luftman’s instrument as a useful tool for practitioners and managers. The result, a more parsimonious instrument than the original one, seems a promising tool calling for further attention and use in research to get to an acceptable and recognized valid instrument to assess business-IT alignment.