Aligning Alignment with Strategic Context: A Literature Review

The alignment of business and IT has been a persistent topic of discussion in the past decades. As information systems have evolved from an administrative support function to an integral part of business fabric, the classic “internal” perspective adopted by the bulk of alignment research falls short in accounting for the dynamic business network context and continuous evolution with the environment. The information systems planning and strategy discourse should transcend the notion of “alignment” and bring out the strategy-shaping role of IT. This paper presents a classification of business–IT alignment approaches vis-à-vis respective schools of thought in strategic management. Both disciplines are seen to co-evolve with the increasingly complex “strategic context”. The approach is meant to help contextualize extant and future work in terms of underlying assumptions and thereby make more conscious statements about the practical applicability of research topics, methods and results in varying contexts. As relatively simple, static and mechanistic conceptualizations of strategy and business–IT alignment render inadequate, concepts such as dynamic capabilities, co-evolution and organizational ambidexterity represent a more adaptive and more encompassing approach to make sense of the increasingly complex strategic context.