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

Towards agility in IT governance frameworks

Digital transformation has changed corporate reality and, with that, firms’ IT environments and IT governance (ITG). As such, the perspective of ITG has shifted from the design of a relatively stable, closed and controllable system of a self-sufficient enterprise to a relatively fluid, open, agile and transformational system of networked co adaptive entities. Related to this paradigm shift in ITG, this paper aims to clarify how the concept of an effective ITG framework has changed in terms of the demand for agility in organizations. Thus, this study conducted 33 qualitative interviews with executives and senior managers from the banking industry in Germany, Switzerland and Austria. Analysis of the interviews focused on the formation of categories and the assignment of individual text parts (codings) to these categories to allow for a quantitative evaluation of the codings per category. Regarding traditional and agile ITG dimensions, 22 traditional and 25 agile dimensions were identified. Moreover, agile strategies within the agile ITG construct and ten ITG patterns were identified from the interview data. The data show relevant perspectives on the implementation of traditional and new ITG dimensions and highlight ambidextrous aspects in ITG frameworks

Interactive selection of Web services under multiple objectives

Neubauer T, Stummer C. Interactive selection of Web services under multiple objectives. Information Technology and Management. 2010;11(1):25-41.The manual composition of efficient combinations of Web services becomes almost impossible as the number of services increases dramatically. When determining an appropriate set of services, managers must take into consideration given business processes, business strategy and multiple Quality of Service (QoS) objectives while ensuring the cost-efficient usage of limited resources. Because the agility with which new business requirements are adapted has a major influence on business success and poor investment decisions may thus entail corporate failure, decision makers are experiencing growing pressure to prove the value of IT investments-but they often lack appropriate multicriteria decision support tools. This paper introduces a new decision support approach that more properly addresses these challenges. We implemented this approach into a tool and evaluated the performance of two popular methods (i.e., the Analytic Hierarchy Process and the Weighted Scoring Method) by means of a real-life case study in the social security sector. It turns out that the decision support system assists decision makers in identifying investments that more precisely target their company's business needs by allowing them to interactively determine and continually optimize service allocation according to the corporate business processes and multiple (strategic) objectives