Agile Management for a stronger alignment between Business Strategy and Information Technology

THE pace of change in IT is very surprising. IT has proposed a solution for several of the Business problems and has been quite effective in doing so. At the same time, this has brought about rapid changing environment and Business needs. Several studies have focused on how the relationship between the IT Strategies and the Business Strategy of the firm can provide both financial and business advantage. The biggest challenge of the Alignment Models have been the implementation, sustainability and responsiveness to the volatile business conditions. On a different evolution pathway, IT development has seen a paradigm shift from traditional sequential computing methods to a more responsive agile methodologies. This change in thinking is in response to the volatile business conditions and the new methodologies prove much more effective over the traditional sequential development techniques. This paper addresses the issues faced by the Strategic Alignment models such as problem of inertia, responsiveness and sustained alignment by proposing the use of Agile Management methodologies. This research addresses the concerns of existing models being mechanistic by proposing a practical attribute to the existing theoretical models and proposing the use of Agile Methodologies to achieve and sustain alignment.