Business IT Alignment—Where should we go: a View from Practice

Abstract

Strategic business IT alignment has been conceptualized and researched through two distinctly different approaches, both with weaknesses when considered from the practitioner perspective. The first from strategic management research assesses “fit” quantitatively as a holistic concept, but cannot open up the underlying enterprise design logic. The second from architecture and engineering method research is focused on the enterprise design in full, and as a consequence overwhelms in detail. Both lack an organizing foundation for developing cumulative knowledge. Our objective is to derive a way forward, by zooming in on the alignment decisions that practitioners perform. Adopting a design science research method, we propose a new domain-based conceptualization that matches practitioner competency areas, with alignment reasoning across. Our operationalization results in three artifacts: domains cover coherent areas of subject matter that reduce contingencies, alignment artifacts envelope underlying designs and extract essential alignment attributes that suppress irrelevant detail, and a knowledge model provides the organizing template for accumulation of actionable knowledge connected to domains and artifacts. We evaluate our approach using criteria for artifact soundness, elaborating a case from practice, populating the knowledge model with existing artifact centric research, and expert interviews. We conclude that our proposed approach takes the middle ground and can integrate with both existing approaches, and provides an excellent case for further research into the nature and structure of theorizing in the broader IS.