Assessing IT-Business Alignment in Service-Oriented Enterprises

Nowadays, more and more businesses transform into service-oriented enterprises in order to sustain their competitive advantage. To ensure that the underlying information technology (IT) can best support the transformation, we aim to develop an IT-business alignment framework to assess the quality of alignment in the context of service-oriented enterprises. Based upon the existing literature, we propose three components of IT-business alignment: strategic alignment, operational alignment, and social alignment. We study their various contributions to the performance of service-oriented IT projects, together with the interactions with service integration level. Our data were collected from Web questionnaires. The total dataset is derived from 300 selected companies in an on-line technology management forum. Among the returned questionnaires, 104 were found to be complete and usable; this represented a response rate of 34 percent. A Partial Least Squares (PLS) analysis is conducted and derives the following three research findings: (1) IT-business alignment plays a significant role in improving the performance of service-oriented IT; (2) the service integration level is an important performance moderator for strategic and operational alignment; (3) the service integration level is an important contributor to social alignment.