It is widely accepted that sustaining Business and Information Technology (IT) alignment is a complex task, due to the lack of appropriate alignment methodologies, rapid changes in running business processes and insufficient IT techniques to cope with such changes. One way of achieving successful alignment is the development of an IT system which meets business expectations. This is only possib...

It has been known for some time that organizations are investing in IT to achieve competitive advantage as well as profit. They have realized that by only investing in IT applications they cannot attain sustainable competitive advantage [TaKr03]. However, to obtain that advantage they need to utilise IT functionality on a continuous basis [HeVe99]. In order to do so IT needs to align with busin...

While executives continue to rate strategic alignment – denoting the fit between information technology (IT) and the business strategy – as a key IT management issue, the rise in business uncertainty in the late 1990s may have given executives cause to question whether attempts to increase strategic alignment limit their ability to maintain strategic flexibility. How corporations structure thei...

This paper focuses on business process engineering especially on alignment between business analysis and implementation. Through a Business Process Management approach, different transformations interfere on process models in order to make them executable. To keep the process model consistency from the business model to the IT one, we propose a pivotal metamodel-centric methodology. It aims at ...

This paper reports on the results of an empirical study into the integration of strategic information systems planning and business-IT alignment, IT evaluation, and the proactive management of business benefits in large organisations, and to consider the linkages achieved between these processes. An argument is developed which suggests that at the heart of good IT governance practice is an inte...

The ability to outsource IT has been suggested as a major driver of IT productivity. At the same time, the literature on the business value of IT suggests that IT business alignment and IT flexibility are important drivers for the performance of IT. But what is, then, the impact of outsourcing on these key value drivers? In this paper, we empirically show that firms with internal IT exhibit sig...

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 environ...

There is a growing recognition among alignment researchers and IT professionals that “one size does not fit all.” In this article, we provide an important extension of alignment research that shows three profiles linking IT to different business objectives. We address the need to identify the appropriate types of IT alignment by using a multi-method study including interviews and cases. Two dim...

In order to help businesses to communicate fruitfully, we present a solution based on ontology alignment for integrating business documents. We focus on detecting and resolving semantic conflicts encountered during the integration process due to different terminologies used in xCBL, cXML and RosettaNet. Our contribution is to benefit from research in the ontology alignment area and considered a...

Performance is a function of the alignment between information systems (IS) strategy and other business domains, including business strategy and organization structure. However, research has focused on the outcomes of that process, rather than the processes by which that alignment is developed. Using multiple case data, this paper investigates alignment in SMEs, explaining why different SMEs fo...