IT Governance Practices For Improving Strategic And Operational Business-IT Alignment

The literature suggests that business-IT alignment is an important antecedent of IS success, business process performance, and competitive advantage. Additionally, IT governance practices are highlighted as being instrumental to fostering business-IT alignment. In this paper, we derive various IT governance practices (in terms of structures, processes, relational mechanisms, and enterprise architecture characteristics) from literature and expert interviews. While prior investigations only considered the effect of such practices on strategic business-IT alignment, we also incorporate alignment at operational level. Using results from a case study in the IT services division of a large multi-national, multi-divisional company acting in diverse industries we highlight the effect of various IT governance practices and offer new insights by showing which mechanisms are effective in facilitating strategic or operational business-IT alignment. Our results indicate the most important practices for both strategic and operational alignment.