TOWARDS A THEORETICALLY CONSISTENT EXPLANATION OF BUSINESS - IT ALIGNMENT Research - in - Progress

Our research addresses one of the most conspicuous and enduring issues facing IT practitioners: how to align a firm’s IT resources with its business needs. Past work in this area has been largely atheoretical and sometimes inconsistent. We seek to provide an internally consistent explanation of how organizations achieve alignment and thereby improve business performance. Our work differs from past work in that we view IT alignment as a dynamic process, drawing on the lenses of three of the most promising theories of IT alignment over the past decade: institutional theory, punctuated equilibrium theory, and complexity theory. Our study seeks to contribute by conducting the first multi-theoretic study of how IT alignment evolves, providing the first comparison of institutional theory, punctuated equilibrium theory, and complexity theory, and using a novel methodology that combines dual-case methods with simulations.