What is the impact of process documentation on the relationship between operational alignment and IT provider flexibility in IT outsourcing relationships? Drawing on a sample of application management outsourcing relationships from the German banking industry, we analyze the connections between interorganizational alignment of IT and business domains and IT provider flexibility. Results show th...

Business-IT alignment is complicated because of the need to align multiple business and IT points of view. A philosophical foundation can help generate methods that bring together these disparate viewpoints in a common model that all stakeholders can agree upon. In this paper, we describe the philosophical foundations of the Systemic Enterprise Architecture Methodology (SEAM) and show how it ca...

Organizations have realized that in order to achieve competitive advantage, IT needs to be strategically aligned with business objectives. To achieve alignment leveraging, Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) is considered fundamental as a comprehensive approach to planning and managing IT actions within the organization, based on its business requirements. This survey reports o...

When assessing the harmony between business and information systems, most of traditional studies deal with the presence and the achievement of strategic alignment. On the contrary, exiguous attention is paid to the phenomenon of strategic misalignment, which means the absence or difficulties of business-IT alignment. This paper deals with strategic misalignment between business and information ...

Business-IT alignment has been one of the top issues in IT managers‟ minds for years. Because of its potential to help an organization improve its Business-IT alignment, IT governance has grown in popularity over the last years. However, little research exists on the topic. An international survey of 113 firms using CobiT was conducted to examine the users‟ satisfaction, impact on Business-IT a...

The alignment of business and information technology (IT) strategies is an important and enduring theoretical challenge for the information systems discipline, remaining a top issue in practice over the past 20 years. Multi-business organizations (MBOs) present a particular alignment challenge because business strategies are developed at the corporate level, within individual strategic business...

Business/IT alignment is a major source of business value generated from IT and social structures at the interface between a firm’s business and IT units are of vital importance to business/IT alignment. Yet, there is a substantial gap in understanding the nature of these social structures. Based on a literature review comprising all related articles published in the AIS Senior Scholars’ Basket...

A long running challenge in both large and small organizations has been aligning information systems services with business needs. Good alignment is assumed to lead to good business results, but there is a need for good instruments to assess strategic alignment and business success in practice. Based on existing information management theories, we develop the I-Fit model and the I-Fit tool. The...

The number of organizations operating on a global scale is continuously increasing in recent years to exploit business opportunities in the global arena. At the same time, enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems are being increasingly adopted to support global businesses. However, how well these systems are aligned with business operations of global businesses is not very well established. T...

CIOs can judge the effectiveness of their business-IT alignment activities by assessing maturity of processes in domains relevant to alignment. Currently, assessment instruments that support this are being developed. This paper reports on a case study aimed at validating four process domains we deemed necessary for inclusion in an assessment instrument that focuses on business-IT alignment at t...