Designing Artifacts of IT Strategy for Achieving Business/IT Alignment

It is increasingly acknowledged that firms cannot be competitive if their business and information technology strategies are not aligned. A number of proposals have been made for achieving strategic alignment. Despite still being a major concern for business executives there is little published research that attempts to give methodological support for achieving strategic alignment in day-to-day business. Additionally it seems that alignment needs to be investigated in terms of formulating and implementing IT strategy on lower levels of abstraction in order to analyze, monitor and control the desired results. At first this paper covers the design of an IT governance architecture, considering existing approaches of enterprise architecture and strategic alignment. Subsequently an approach for clarifying the domain IT strategy by designing fine grained artifacts is presented. By choosing this approach, alignment is more likely to be achieved in practice and therefore, IT strategy implementation is supported.