Six types of IT-business strategic alignment: an investigation of the constructs and their measurement

Abstract

Top management has been concerned with IT-business strategic alignment (hereafter referred to as alignment) for the past 30 years. Consequently, alignment researchers have developed many models to explain how alignment generates value for firms. However, these models use inconsistent definitions and measures of alignment, which has led to conflicting results and has potentially inhibited the progress of research on this critical topic. This paper emphasizes the importance of demarcating the six alignment types that are sometimes confused in the literature into a single, unified model. It also reports on the development of definitions and measures of these six types of alignment including alignment between IT and business strategies (i.e., intellectual alignment), between IT and business infrastructures and processes (i.e., operational alignment), and across these two domains such that strategies are linked with infrastructures and processes (i.e., four types of cross-domain alignment). Analyzing survey data collected from 140 Chief Information Officers, we found each measure possesses desirable psychometric properties. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.

Keywords:

• alignment
• IT-business strategic alignment
• intellectual
• operational
• cross-domain

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jennifer E Gerow

About the Authors

Jennifer E. Gerow is an Assistant Professor in the Economics and Business department at Virginia Military Institute. She holds a B.S. in Biological Sciences with a minor in Secondary Education, an M.B.A., and a Ph.D. in Management (Concentration: Information Systems) from Clemson University. Her research interests are power and politics in the workplace, IT-business strategic alignment, and drivers of IT use/resistance. She has previously published in the European Journal of Information Systems, Computers in Human Behavior, Journal of Information Technology Theory and Application, the Journal of Service Science & Management, and the proceedings of various conferences.

Jason Bennett Thatcher

Jason Bennett Thatcher directs the Social Analytics Institute and is a Professor of Information Systems in the Department of Management at Clemson University. He holds B.A.’s in History (Cum Laude) and Political Science (Cum Laude) from the University of Utah as well as a M.P.A. from the Askew School of Public Administration and Policy and a Ph.D. in Business Administration from the College of Business at Florida State University. His work appears in MIS Quarterly, Journal of the AIS, Journal of Applied Psychology, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Journal of Management Information Systems, European Journal of Information Systems, and IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management. He lives in Greenville, South Carolina where he reads Garden and Gun, sips bourbon, and smokes BBQ.

Varun Grover

Varun Grover is the William S. Lee (Duke Energy) Distinguished Professor of Information Systems at Clemson University. He has published extensively in the information systems field, with over 200 publications in major refereed journals. Nine recent articles have ranked him among the top four researchers based on number of publications in the top Information Systems journals, as well as citation impact (h-index). He is Senior Editor for MISQ Executive, and Senior Editor (Emeritus) for MIS Quarterly, the Journal of the AIS and Database. He is currently working in the areas of IT value, system politics, and process transformation and recently released his third book (with M. Lynne Markus) on process change. He is recipient of numerous awards from USC, Clemson, AIS, DSI, Anbar, PriceWaterhouse and so on for his research and teaching and is a Fellow of the Association for Information Systems.