What Matters in Business/IT Shared Understanding? Development of a Unified Construct

The mutual understanding, shared knowledge, or cognition between business and IT units has been discussed frequently and in wide range of fields in IS research. On the other hand, we are still lacking a consistent and comprehensive conceptualization of what shared business/IT understanding is actually about, and previous studies have usually only taken some aspects of it into account. These often single-dimensional determinations represent an incomplete picture of shared business/IT understanding and thus can potentially lead to wrong or incomplete findings and implications. This research in progress steps into this gap and develops a comprehensive construct of shared business/IT understanding to provide future research with a unified concept that can be applied to various IS research contexts. In this paper, we discuss current conceptualizations of shared business/IT understanding and integrate them to a unified multidimensional construct, which will be validated and adjusted in future empirical research.