An empirical study that explores business-IT alignment processes in a networked organization among the province Overijssel, the municipalities Zwolle and Enschede, the water board district Regge & Dinkel and Royal Grolsch N.V. in The Netherlands, is summarized in this report. The aim of the study was to identify processes that contribute to improve such alignment. This study represents a contin...

Business-IT alignment can be achieved at various levels of maturity. Supposing that an organization has tried to achieve business-IT alignment, a question to face is: how is that organization going to know the level of maturity of its alignment situation in order to plan future ways of action? That organization will need a guide for determining the maturity of its business-IT alignment, and for...

AbstrAct Achieving IT-business alignment has been a long-standing, critical, information management issue. A theoretical framework of the maturity levels of management practices and strategic IT choices that facilitate alignment was empirically tested and validated. Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) validated 6 factors and identified 22 indices to measure strategic alignment maturity. A mixed ...

More and more firms urge their procurement departments to optimize their processes and leverage IT in order to reduce costs, increase quality and sustainability of received products and services, and shorten delivery times. Already in the nineties of the previous century Henderson and Venkatraman (IBM Systems Journal 32(1):4–16, 1993) identified business/IT-alignment as a key to organizational ...

In order to provide a competitive advantage to the enterprise, the business strategy and processes and its information system (IS) need to be aligned. Achieving strategic alignment continues to be a major concern for business executives and becomes more difficult to handle in an evolving environment. The literature provides conceptual frameworks dividing a company representation in independent ...

Alignment and IT flexibility have been found to be crucial for a firm’s long-term success in many industries. This paper investigates how alignment and flexibility are interrelated at an operational level. Based on a survey with Germany’s Top 1,000 banks we show on a business process level that shared knowledge and mutual understanding (as dimensions of alignment) between IT unit and business d...

Reaching a Strategic Alignment is a crucial aspect for any organization. The alignment can be achieved by controlling, through monitoring probes, the coherency of the Business Processes with the related Business Strategy. In this paper we present SAF, a powerful framework for those organizations that aim at a superior business performance and want to keep monitored the organization’s alignment....

Recently, the importance of Information Technology (IT) for effective Knowledge Management (KM) activities has been stated. Effective KM projects alone cannot lead to success without the support of IT, and vice versa. Thus aligning proper IT and KM strategies to fit the business strategy is the key to reducing costs, which in turn leads to higher performance. Drawing on the concept of strategic...