Validating the coevolutionary principles of business and IS alignment via agent-based modeling

ABSTRACT

This paper provides theoretical and practical implications for the application of agent-based models (ABMs) to address the issue of coevolutionary business-IS alignment. The implications stem from the following arguments: (a) the alignment issue can be modelled by an ABM to describe the features of complex adaptive systems (CAS); (b) the coevolutionary principles of business and IS alignment stipulate individual behaviours and guide organisational order; (c) ABM development and experimentation offer guidance to better explain how organisations control the alignment trajectory with coevolutionary principles. To extend the extant coevolutionary research on alignment, this paper develops an ABM for a hierarchical organisational structure and validates three coevolutionary principles.

KEYWORDS:

• Coevolutionary principles
• business-IS alignment
• ABM
• CAS

Accepting Editor Ojelanki Ngwenyama Associate editor Kweku-Muata Osei-Bryson

Accepting Editor Ojelanki Ngwenyama Associate editor Kweku-Muata Osei-Bryson

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [71571189].