Role of Human Resource in Information Technology Alignment in Organizations

Information technology (IT) is increasingly becoming an important factor and fundamental to support business processes in organizations. IT acquisitions are quite productive in supporting transactions and in aiding coordination mechanism provided the organizational resources and business processes are properly aligned with the IT. However, many IT acquisition projects fail due to improper alignment of the business process with IT. Role of human resource (HR) is quite critical to such alignment process. It is important that acquiring organizations display HR capability to support alignment process especially in the pre-acquisition stage to minimize the post acquisition shocks. In this paper role of HR in IT alignment process is discussed through some metrics during pre-acquisition stage. A framework is developed and causal relationships among metrics are discussed. This framework is then tested for its fitness and applied to a case for appreciation.