Abstract:
As the information age progresses, people and businesses alike have become accustomed to the convenience that technology brings into our lives. However, in the business world, high failure rates of projects to produce such technological systems have led to depleted profits and are an embarrassment to managers. These pressures have created a cultural gap between business and IT managers. It would benefit both business and IT managers to align the outputs of the IT function with the goals of the organisation and reduce this gap. However, the literature shows that, in the three to four decades that IT has been used in business, managers have been having difficulty in implementing the alignment of business and IT in practice. Therefore, the study began with the general purpose of determining why implementation of alignment is so difficult, and to develop a framework to guide practitioners towards successful implementation of alignment within their organisations. A review of the field of business and IT alignment was done which revealed a rich theory base and that the solution must lie in applying theory to the firm. The review also revealed a very well-established model in business-IT alignment theory; the Strategic Alignment Model (SAM). These findings shifted the main purpose of the study to focus the quest for a business and IT alignment solution to the context of the organisation. In particular, to determine the organisational attributes that could be used to provide a guiding framework for business and IT managers that could lead them to one of the four perspectives of the SAM most suited to their specific organisation. The academic importance of this study is the introduction of the three antecedents of alignment, namely, the role of the IT function, the mode of operation of the IT function and the sourcing option of the IT function. The methodology entails a web-based survey of a case organisation to establish the preconditions or antecedents of alignment. The study further shows how to extract viable focus areas to determine the goals of alignment and how to establish matters of timing between business and the IT function. It is hoped the framework developed, based on contextual information of the organisation, may fill the gap of applying alignment theory to practice.
