Antecedents of Strategic Information Systems Alignment in Iran

ABSTRACT

Factors affecting business-information technology strategic alignment have been investigated in numerous research studies, mostly in developed countries including Western Europe and North America. Given that the Western world has a distinct business culture, there is reason to investigate the boundaries of the generalizability of these research studies. This article, therefore, investigates strategic alignment in a non-Western, developing-country context, specifically Iran. For this purpose, the antecedents of alignment in the existing literature were investigated. After categorizing them and developing a research model, the model was tested using structural equation modeling. Our main aim is to find out whether the antecedents identified in prior studies are also relevant in Iran. The results provide preliminary evidence of differences between the factors affecting strategic alignment in each region.

KEYWORDS:

• Business strategy
• developing country
• Iran
• IT strategy
• partial least squares
• strategic alignment
• structural equation modeling

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to express their appreciation to Dr. Jeffrey M. Baker for his valuable comments and sharing his knowledge. Moreover, the authors appreciate Dr. Vahid Baradaran and Mr. Rasool Gholamzadeh for their kind help in statistical analysis.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Neda Abdolvand

Neda Abdolvand is an assistant professor in Alzahra University and was a postdoctoral research fellow at Tarbiat Modares University. She holds her PhD and MS in information technology from Tarbiat Modares University and a post graduate certificate in information systems from Melbourne University. She is interested in research in the field of information systems, including technology adoption, strategic alignment, and big data analytics. She has been a member of the Association for Information Systems since 2009.

Mohammad Mehdi Sepehri

Medi Mehdi Sepehri is an associate professor at the Department of Industrial Engineering, Tarbiat Modares University (TMU), Tehran, Iran; founder and head of The Laboratory for Healthcare Systems Optimization, Engineering, and Informatics (HCSE); Head of Industrial Engineering Group; Editor-in-Chief, International Journal of Hospital Research, the official peer review publication of Hospital Management Research Center (HMRC), Iran University of Medical Sciences. Dr. Sepehri obtained his MSc and PhD in management science from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Tennessee, USA, in 1987 and 1991. His current research focuses on operations research in medicine and healthcare, healthcare systems engineering, mobile health, lean healthcare, and lean hospitals.