A Literature Review of Business/IT Alignment Strategies

AbstractIn the last years, the alignment issue was addressed in several researches and numerous methods, techniques and tools were proposed. Indeed, the business and IT performance are tightly coupled, and enterprises cannot be competitive if their business and IT strategies are not aligned. This paper proposes a literature review useful for evaluating different alignment approaches, with the aim of discovering similarity, maturity, capability to measure, model, asses and evolve the alignment level existing among business and technological assets of an enterprise. The proposed framework is applied to analyse the alignment research published in the Information & Management journal and the Journal of Strategic Information Systems, that are the ones that more published on this topic. The achieved evaluation results are presented

PENGEMBANGAN STRATEGI IS/IT DALAM BERBAGAI BIDANG BISNIS: STATE OF THE ART

ABSTRACTIS/IT strategy is one of the keys to a company's success in running a business. IS/IT is usually in line with existing business strategies. In the last few decades, many IS/IT models have been developed and implemented with the aim of improving business management by utilizing the latest technology. Motivated by the application of IS/IT in various business models, this paper aims to emphasize the importance of this strategy in business transformation. This paper contains an overview of the strategy and identification of IS/IT strategies that have been implemented in various business areas. This paper is expected to provide additional knowledge for researchers, communities and IS/IT practitioners in developing and implementing better IS/IT in the future. Keywords: IS/IT strategy, business strategy, management I

Alignment of Business Models and Software: Using an Architecture-Centric Method to the Case of a Healthcare Information System

The alignment of business issues with technological service-oriented solutions has proven to be a crucial aspect of modern business development. In this regard, the provision of methods to solve the gap between business and technology becomes absolutely necessary. This paper presents a proposal to systematize that leap by defining a development method centred on the concept of Architecture. The use of different architectural models at different levels of abstraction (along with the definition of model transformations between them) allows for the establishment of a trace between the business-level elements and software elements that are derived from them. Key benefits of our proposal are, on the one hand, the provision of a method for business-technology alignment and, on the other hand, the definition of a new model to represent the structure of a business. This proposal has been refined and validated using the case of an information system for the management of paediatric percentiles

CIO Performance Measurement

Over the last decades, the academy and the community of practice have described the differences in CIO profiles recognizing that the challenges posed by the technological development and the evolution of business models require a wide array of abilities and skills that not always match companies and individuals. If the classic idea of ‘what you measure is what you get’ is also true in IT, then a possible explanation of the misalignments of IS/IT units may lie in the wrong measurement of the expected performances and results of CIOs. This conceptual article explores and describes the effects of performance management and analyzes how it could affect the performance of the CIO

IT governance: oil or sand in the wheels of innovation?

The purpose of this study is to understand how IT Governance (ITG) can foster or hinder the development and roll-out of radical or disruptive IT-enabled innovations. Propositions derived from the extant literature guide the analysis of seven embedded case studies of different innovation initiatives within a single large Dutch multinational bank with various contingency factors affecting ITG across the cases. Our findings confirm and extend earlier studies that emphasize the importance of proper business-IT communication and identify challenges caused by long gatekeeping processes and by the use of novel technologies in a traditional IT landscape. Radical or disruptive innovations also add new challenges, as they often cross business lines and therefore may be exposed to a heterogeneous set of ITG mechanisms. Our study further demonstrates that these innovations demand a different approach on an IT-functional level and a reconsideration of the risk capability structure to optimize efficiency

A magyarországi gazdálkodó szervezetek szoftverkörnyezetének empirikus vizsgálata

Ez a tanulmány egy kérdőíves felmérés eredményeire támaszkodva azt a kérdést vizsgálja, hogy a magyarországi gazdálkodó szervezetek üzleti tevékenységei milyen mértékben támogatottak különböző szoftveres megoldásokkal. A beérkezett 498 válasz egymástól jelentős mértékben eltérő mintázata és a szoftver-környezet egyes elemei között mutatkozó relatív alacsony korrelációja egy olyan, új értékelési rendszer kialakítását tette szükségessé. Az új elemzési eljárás képes az egyes gazdálkodó szervetek által rendszeresített szoftver-környezeteket a korábbi kutatásokban tapasztaltaknál részletesebben elemezni, de robosztus marad a válaszokban mutatkozó jelentős különbségekre. A korábban publikált elméleti eredményekre, valamint a kvantitatív kutatásokban bemutatott eljárások tapasztalataira építve ez az elemzési módszertan a feltáró faktorelemzésen (EFA) és a részben arra épülő konfirmatív faktorelemzésen (CFA) alapul. A kutatásomban igazolódott, hogy ezen mutatószám-rendszer be tudja tölteni más modellekben a magyarázó-változó szerepét, így objektív módon, kvantitatív eszközök segítségével mérhetővé vált az IKT-infrastruktúra az azt üzemeltető gazdálkodó szervezetekre gyakorolt hatása. Abstract: Based on the results of a questionnaire survey, the aim of this research is to investigate the extent to which the business activities of the for-profit organizations in Hungary are supported by various software solutions. The significantly different pattern of the 498 responses received and the relatively low correlation between each element of the software environment made necessary the development of a new evaluation system. The new method of analysis procedure can analyse the software environments for-profit organizations in Hungary more sophistically than in previous research, but it is robust for significant differences in the received answers of the questionnaire. Based on previously published theoretical results and methods used in quantitative research, this analytical methodology is based on the methods of exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA). The research proved that this system of indicators can fulfil the role of an explanatory variable in other models, so the impact of the software-environment of the ICT infrastructure of the for-profit organizations in Hungary on their operators can be measured in an objective way, by using the quantitative tools

Business process oriented information systems modeling / Modelação de sistemas de informação orientados para processos empresariais

Business processes have a relevant role in business information systems (BIS) design definitions. In this paper, we present a methodology for BIS modeling for capturing and aligning the relevant elements of the business and the information system domains. It results in a driver for the requirements engineering and production of systems analysis artifacts that support BIS design and development. We present the methodology application and its outcomes promoting a better understanding by the participants in an agile and objective manner

Business IT Alignment through the Lens of Complexity Science

Business IT alignment has been a top concern for academics and corporate managers for over 30 years. Despite a rich literature, it is still far from been an achieved objective in companies. Leveraging on the similarities between Information and Complex Systems, researchers have recently adopted a new perspective to study Information Systems and their alignment with business. The present study is based on an extensive literature review that spans three domains of research: Information Systems, Complexity Science, and Organization Science. The paper proposes to contribute to the study and implementation of alignment by presenting a classification framework for the different alignment approaches exploiting methods derived from Complexity Science. Four types of approaches to alignment are identified and for each of them the potential contribution to alignment dimensions is discussed

Investigating the factors which influence the misalignment between developers and testers in agile organizations

The concept of alignment has been addressed in the context of various divisions within organizations but very little research investigates the alignment of the roles within specific sub-units in an organization. Research shows evidence of a misalignment between the role of the software tester and the software developer in software development teams specifically in organizations that adopt agile methodologies to manage their software development projects. It is this misalignment between these two roles and the lack of research on the factors that influence this phenomenon that prompted the study. The study aims to investigate the factors which influence misalignment between developers and testers in agile organizations with specific focus on the social dimension of alignment contrary to most studies that merely address the intellectual dimension of alignment. The research methodology followed a positivist, quantitative and deductive approach. An online questionnaire was designed and distributed to respondents in South Africa (SA) and United States of America (USA). The results show that there are four factors that have an overall influence on the misalignment between developers and testers in agile software development teams. These factors are (1) process non-compliance combined with lack of accountability, (2) conflicting interpersonal skills, (3) lack of shared domain knowledge, specifically lack of developers' knowledge about testing and (4) poor collaboration. Future research can proceed to identify the strategies that agile organizations can adopt alleviate this problem of misalignment