Fitting Business Models to System Functionality: Alignment issues and challenges

Alignment between IT systems and the business they support has been considered as a key issue for several years by both researchers and professionals. As [Lufman04] [Reich03] [Tallon02] [Watson97] or [Brancheau96] already showed it, strategic alignment between IS and business objectives is a top priority for CIOs and IT executives. There is also, a large corpus of empirical and theoretical evidence that more tactical alignment between information systems and the business processes they support improves organizational performance (e.g. [Chan97], [Kefi05], [Chan02], [Sabherwal01], [Croteau01]). Furthermore, studies highlight the lack of alignment as a major cause for business processes failure in providing return on investments. If alignment clearly appears as desirable, a number of issues still remain unsolved as for example: (i) the achievement of BP-IS alignment and, (ii) its management over time [Hirschheim01], but also (iii) the identification of non fit and (iv) its evaluation [Soffer04].