Assessing Business-It Alignment Maturity on Multiple Organizational Levels

Close collaboration and harmony between IT and business are crucial to succeeding with efficient and effective digitalization. This is encapsulated in the concept of Business-IT alignment (BITA). Much has been written in the research literature regarding what BITA entails, how to assess BITA, and how to improve BITA. However, none of these frameworks or theories provide a practical framework that treats BITA as a multi-leveled, co-evolving process between business and IT. The purpose of this paper is thus to provide a Multi-Level BITA framework, for assessing BITA on multiple-organizational levels. The framework is constructed based on an analysis of the existing BITA frameworks and is applied to an empirical case, to evaluate its applicability to practice. The analysis shows how the BITA maturity in the case company varies and decreases along with the organizational levels and how it is assessed higher by IT than by business. An in-depth reasoning behind the BITA maturity scores is provided by in-depth interviews. The Multi-Level BITA framework thus demonstrates its applicability in assessing and visualizing BITA maturity on multiple organizational levels and identifying the underlying causes for the assessment

IRIS Conference Health Check. Traditions, tensions, and reformations

Regional conferences support researchers to network in a cost-efficient way. Quite often, such conferences become tight communities where friends and colleagues meet and share ideas regularly, year after year. However, with increasing public interest towards universities and the ideology of private-public management, deans and other managers have started to urge for high-quality scientific impact. Under the circumstances, regional conferences, with limited publication opportunities and lesser worldwide visibility among academics, have begun to lose their status as an important venue for science and networking. It is equally easy and cheap to travel and attend more prestigious venues. In this paper, we analyze the main conference of the Scandinavian Chapter of the Association for Information Systems (AIS), aka IRIS association, namely IRIS, Information Systems Research Seminar in Scandinavia. We aim to understand what makes regional conferences (and chapters) sustainable. Our argumentation is based on two empirical studies; an analysis of the IRIS participants between 2011-2019 and a survey among senior scholars in the region