A model to assess customer alignment through customer experience concepts

Business and Information Technology Alignment (BITA) has been one of the main concerns of IT and Business executives and directors due to its importance to overall company performance, especially today in the age of digital transformation. For BITA has been developed several models which in general has focused in the implementation of alignment strategies for the internal operation of the organizations and in the measurement of this internal alignment, but, there is still a big gap in measurement models of the alignment with the external environment of the organizations. In this paper is presented the design and application of a maturity measurement model for BITA with the customers, where the customers are actors of the external environment of the companies. The proposed model involves evaluation criteria and business practices which the companies ideally do for improve the relationship with their customers.Comment: 12 pages, Preprint version, BIS 2019 International Workshops, Seville, Spain, June 26 to 28, 2019, Revised Paper

Partial Coherence Estimation via Spectral Matrix Shrinkage under Quadratic Loss

Partial coherence is an important quantity derived from spectral or precision matrices and is used in seismology, meteorology, oceanography, neuroscience and elsewhere. If the number of complex degrees of freedom only slightly exceeds the dimension of the multivariate stationary time series, spectral matrices are poorly conditioned and shrinkage techniques suggest themselves. When true partial coherencies are quite large then for shrinkage estimators of the diagonal weighting kind it is shown empirically that the minimization of risk using quadratic loss (QL) leads to oracle partial coherence estimators superior to those derived by minimizing risk using Hilbert-Schmidt (HS) loss. When true partial coherencies are small the methods behave similarly. We derive two new QL estimators for spectral matrices, and new QL and HS estimators for precision matrices. In addition for the full estimation (non-oracle) case where certain trace expressions must also be estimated, we examine the behaviour of three different QL estimators, the precision matrix one seeming particularly robust and reliable. For the empirical study we carry out exact simulations derived from real EEG data for two individuals, one having large, and the other small, partial coherencies. This ensures our study covers cases of real-world relevance

Assessing Business-IT Alignment Maturity

Strategic alignment focuses on the activities that management performs to achieve cohesive goals across the IT (Information Technology) and other functional organizations (e.g., finance, marketing, H/R, manufacturing). Therefore, alignment addresses both how IT is in harmony with the business, and how the business should, or could be in harmony with IT. Alignment evolves into a relationship where the function of IT and other business functions adapt their strategies together. Achieving alignment is evolutionary and dynamic. It requires strong support from senior management, good working relationships, strong leadership, appropriate prioritization, trust, and effective communication, as well as a thorough understanding of the business and technical environments. Achieving and sustaining alignment demands focusing on maximizing the enablers and minimizing the inhibitors that cultivate alignment. The strategic alignment maturity assessment provides organizations with a vehicle to evaluate these activities. Knowing the maturity of its strategic choices and alignment practices make it possible for a firm to see where it stands and how it can improve. This paper discusses an approach for assessing the maturity of the business-IT alignment. Once maturity is understood, an organization can identify opportunities for enhancing the harmonious relationship of business and IT

Business and Information Technology Alignment Measurement -- a recent Literature Review

Since technology has been involved in the business context, Business and Information Technology Alignment (BITA) has been one of the main concerns of IT and Business executives and directors due to its importance to overall company performance, especially today in the age of digital transformation. Several models and frameworks have been developed for BITA implementation and for measuring their level of success, each one with a different approach to this desired state. The BITA measurement is one of the main decision-making tools in the strategic domain of companies. In general, the classical-internal alignment is the most measured domain and the external environment evolution alignment is the least measured. This literature review aims to characterize and analyze current research on BITA measurement with a comprehensive view of the works published over the last 15 years to identify potential gaps and future areas of research in the field.Comment: 12 pages, Preprint version, BIS 2018 International Workshops, Berlin, Germany, July 18 to 20, 2018, Revised Paper

Business and I/T Strategic Alignment:New Perspectives and Assessments

This research describes the results and findings from a two-year study of strategic alignment. Executives from over 300 firms representing 15 industries attended classes at IBM\u27s Advanced Business Institute during 1992-1994. They asked for help in assessing strategic alignment within their companies. A computer-based tool was used to evaluate alignment within these firms. Eight new alignment perspectives were validated, along with the four original perspectives from the Strategic Alignment Model. A pre-and post-assessment comparison suggests that executives often do not correctly recognize their firm\u27s alignment perspective and the role I/T can play in meeting business objectives. These findings emphasize the need to assess business and I/T using the alignment perspective approach to maximize the investment of I/T resources within the firm. Results also suggest that the relationship between these perspectives on title/function, industry and firm performance directly affects the firm\u27s alignment. Analysis of title/function indicates that I/T executives are concentrating on the business side (e.g.competitive potential and organization infrastructure fusion) while non-I/T executives are focusing more on technology (e.g. business-related perspectives such as technology potential and I/T infrastructure fusion). Industry analysis indicates that firms in certain industries tend to follow specific perspectives more often. Assessment of the impact of financial performance results in 7 factors that have varying degrees of impact on alignment. The factors provide management with a vehicle to predict the likelihood of achieving positive performance regarding a given factor. The computer-based assessment tool developed by Luftman and Brier (based on work by Henderson and Thomas, 1992) is used to assess the alignment of business and I/T in firms. The purpose of the model is to help firms identify areas of strength and weakness related to alignment. Information provided by the model enable firms to evaluate, achieve, and maintain alignment

Enablers and Inhibitors of Business-IT Alignment

This paper provides insight into identifying areas that help or hinder business-IT alignment. Alignment focuses on the activities that management performs to achieve cohesive goals across the organization. The aim of this paper is to determine the most important enablers and inhibitors to alignment. The paper presents and analyzes the results of a multi-year study of strategic alignment. Data were obtained from business and information technology executives of over 800 firms representing 15 industries who attended classes addressing alignment at IBM\u27s Advanced Business Institute. The executives were asked to describe those activities that assist in achieving alignment and those which seem to hinder it. These enablers and inhibitors to alignment were then analyzed with respect to industry, to time, and executive position. The results indicate that certain activities can assist in the achievement of this state of alignment while others are clearly barriers. Achieving alignment is evolutionary and dynamic. It requires strong support from senior management, good working relationships, strong leadership, appropriate prioritization, trust, and effective communication, as well as a thorough understanding of the business environment. Achieving alignment demands focusing on maximizing the enablers and minimizing the inhibitors. The data show these factors to be constant over time and to be nearly identical for business executives and for IT executives. Furthermore, the data validate published anecdotal descriptions of enablers and inhibitors

Random Matrix Derived Shrinkage of Spectral Precision Matrices

Much research has been carried out on shrinkage methods for real-valued covariance matrices. In spectral analysis of $p$-vector-valued time series there is often a need for good shrinkage methods too, most notably when the complex-valued spectral matrix is singular. The equivalent of the Ledoit-Wolf (LW) covariance matrix estimator for spectral matrices can be improved on using a Rao-Blackwell estimator, and using random matrix theory we derive its form. Such estimators can be used to better estimate inverse spectral (precision) matrices too, and a random matrix method has previously been proposed and implemented via extensive simulations. We describe the method, but carry out computations entirely analytically, and suggest a way of selecting an important parameter using a predictive risk approach. We show that both the Rao-Blackwell estimator and the random matrix estimator of the precision matrix can substantially outperform the inverse of the LW estimator in a time series setting. Our new methodology is applied to EEG-derived time series data where it is seen to work well and deliver substantial improvements for precision matrix estimation