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1-s2 business alignments strategy on michel porteret low
Business law (301)
Jimma University
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Procedia Technology 5 ( 2012 ) 462 – 474
2212-0173 © 2012 Published by Elsevier Ltd. Selection and/or peer review under responsibility of CENTERIS/SCIKA - Association for Promotion and Dissemination of Scientific Knowledge doi: 10.1016/j.protcy.2012.
CENTERIS 2012 - Conference on ENTERprise Information Systems / HCIST 2012 - International
Conference on Health and Social Care Information Systems and Technologies
A literature review of Business/IT Alignment Strategies
Lerina Aversano*, Carmine Grasso, Maria Tortorella
Departement of Engineering, University of Sannio Via Traiano, 82100 Benevento, Italy
Abstract
In the last years, the alignment issue was addressed in several researches and numerous methods, techniques and tools
were proposed. Indeed, the business and IT performance are tightly coupled, and enterprises cannot be competitive if their
business and IT strategies are not aligned. This paper proposes a literature review useful for evaluating different alignment
approaches, with the aim of discovering similarity, maturity, capability to measure, model, asses and evolve the alignment
level existing among business and technological assets of an enterprise. The proposed framework is applied to analyse the
alignment research published in the Information & Management journal and the Journal of Strategic Information Systems,
that are the ones that more published on this topic. The achieved evaluation results are presented.
© 2012 Published by Elsevier Ltd. Selection and/or peer-review under responsibility of
CENTERIS/HCIST.
Keywords: measurement framework; evaluation and analysis; enterprise evolution; modeling; alignment
1. Introduction
The alignment between business processes and supporting software systems is currently a top research
issue. It was mentioned for the first time in the late 1970s and since then several studies and researches were
- Corresponding author. Tel.:+39 0824 305551; fax: +39 0824 50552 E-mail address: aversano@unisannio.
Available online at sciencedirect
© 2012 Published by Elsevier Ltd. Selection and/or peer review under responsibility of CENTERIS/SCIKA -
Association for Promotion and Dissemination of Scientific KnowledgeOpen access under CC BY-NC-ND license.
Open access under CC BY-NC-ND license.
conducted highlighting the alignment concerns [1]. During the last decade, several studies addressing this
issue were proposed by researchers, practitioners and companies, but most of them are still at an embryonic
stage. They demonstrated through case studies, surveys and empirical approaches that the business and IT
(Information Technology) performance are tightly coupled [2-5], and enterprises cannot be competitive if their
business and IT strategies are not aligned. The proposed studies are oriented at different abstraction levels [6],
from the functional to the strategic one. In particular, Strategic Alignment of IT exists when goals, activities
and processes of a business organization are in harmony with the information systems supporting them [7-8].
On the other hand at the functional level the analysis of the alignment between existing business processes and
software systems is necessary for optimizing the effectiveness of the software support. In literature, different
terms are used to refer the alignment concept: in [9], it is called fit; it is also defined bridge [10]; integration in
[11]; harmony in [12]; linkage in [13]; fusion in [14]; and further definition and terms are in [3]. To address
future research concerning the alignment, it is necessary to understand what is already addressed in the state of
the art with a deep investigation of the executed researches, highlighting the unresolved critical issues. With
this in mind, this paper proposes a literature review aiming at understanding: kind of studies conducted in this
area; main issues covered by the proposed alignment approaches; and their effective application to a working
context. The proposed review implied a careful analysis of the literature considering the alignment topics. This
analysis aimed at identifying commonalities and differences among the proposed approaches. As explained in
the following, the review first focused on all the journals identified by ScienceDirect treating the alignment
topic. Then, the most representative ones were discussed: Information & Management Journal and Journal of
Strategic Information Systems.
The rest of the paper is organized as follow: Section 2 gives an overview of the background on the
alignment topic; Section 3 describes the selection process of the analysed papers; Section 4 describes the
results obtained from the selected journals; Section 5 presents the results of the review of the alignment papers
focusing on the modeling issue with reference to the most representative journals; and final remarks are given
in the last section.
2. Background
A view of business and technological alignment defines at which degree the information technology
mission, objectives, and plans, support and are supported by the business mission, objectives, and plans [15].
Moreover, it involves “fit” and “integration” among business strategy, IT strategy, business infrastructure, and
IT infrastructure [6, 16]. A relevant “problem” [17] is the understanding of what business and information
systems alignment is, how to obtain and maintain it. Traditional approaches addresses the alignment looking
for how organizations can achieve alignment, but with little contribution on how to identify and correct
misalignment. For being useful and completely applicable, it is necessary that an alignment strategy includes
the following set of phases: Modeling of the various entities involved in the alignment concepts and of the
links between business and IT entities; Measurement of the alignment degree existing between the chosen
assets for establishing if improvement actions are necessary; Evolution for improving the degree of alignment.
An automatic support is also useful for supporting all the process for the alignment management.
Several approaches were proposed to address the alignment issue from modeling to measurement. One of
the first model was SAM – Strategic Alignment Model [6]. Different study were later performed for
evaluating these models. For example, in [18], the SAM model was used in financial service firms for
determining if it was useful to asses strategic alignment between IT and business. In [19], the general aspects
concerning modeling was debated and a modeling issue was proposed. In particular, the VMOST – Vision,
Mission, Objectives, Strategies, Tactics – analysis was treated to split the business strategy into the main
components of vision, mission, goals, strategies and tactics, and the BRG – Business Rules Group – model
study, 131 papers distributed within 46 journal were selected. In a second phase, a deep analysis of the papers
was conducted and 90 papers on 37 journals were selected.
Following the first analysis, the journals that were discovered to be the most representative of the
alignment topic, and modeling in particular, were Information & Management Journal and Journal of Strategic
Information Systems from Elsevier. From the first journal, 28 articles were identified, 16 of which were
discarded as 5 of them were not available on-line, 3 were published before 2003, and 4 did not concern
Business and IT alignment. Therefore, the 16 papers listed in the table of the Appendix were considered for
being analyzed. From Journal of Strategic Information Systems, 18 articles were identified: 8 of them were
published before 2003, and 3 were discarded as they were out of topic. The 7 remaining papers, listed in the
table of the Appendix, were included in the analysis.
4. Alignment strategies in the analysed papers
As explained in the previous section, the search of papers regarding Software and Business alignment in
Science Direct brought to the identification of 90 papers distributed in 37 journal and published in the period
2003-2012. The first aspect that came out was that the publisher of all the identified journals was Elsevier. It
was also found that the total number of journals treating alignment aspects was quite high, or at least higher
than expected. In any case, except in some case, each journal published a small number of papers. This results
quite evident by observing Table 1, where all the involved papers are listed in the second column. The table
also lists the number, proportion, and cumulative proportion of the papers published in each journal.
Table 1. Science Direct papers treating Alignment topics
Journal Count Proportion (fk) Cumulative Proportion (Fk) Journal Information & Management 16 17% 17% Journal of Strategic Information Systems 7 7% 25% Journal of Operations Management 5 5% 31% Industrial Marketing Management 5 5% 36% Expert Systems with Applications 5 5% 42% Int. J. Production Economics 5 5% 47% Long Range Planning 4 4% 52% Government Information Quarterly 4 4% 56% Journal of Business Research 3 3% 60% Int. Journal of Information Management 3 3% 63% Hospitality Management 3 3% 66% Journal of Purchasing & Supply Management 2 2% 68% Int. Journal of Project Management 2 2% 71% Information and Software Technology 2 2% 73% Information and Organization 2 2% 75% Others 22 24% 100% Sum 90 100%
The cumulative proportion shows that more than 50 percent of the alignment papers were published in 7
journals, and just 15 journals published more than the three fourth of all the involved papers. Each of the other
journal published only one paper regarding alignment. In addition, in the considered period the most
representative journal regarding this topic is Journal Information & Management with 16 papers, followed by
Journal of Strategic Information Systems with 7 papers.
Table 2 shows the distribution of the publication of the analyzed journals in the period going from 2003 to
2012. It is worth noticing that except for a small peak in 2005, the large amount of publications were
published in the last years. In fact, if it is considered that year 2012 is not yet finish yet, the large part of
publications is concentrated in the last years starting from 2009.
Table 2. Distribution of the published paper in the period 2003-
Year Count Proportion(fk) Cumulative Proportion(Fk) 2012 2 2% 2% 2011 17 18% 21% 2010 17 18% 40% 2009 11 12% 52% 2008 5 5% 57% 2007 8 8% 66% 2006 9 10% 76% 2005 10 11% 87% 2004 9 10% 97% 2003 2 2% 100% Sum 90 100%
Besides the publication year, the papers were analyzed for their typology. Three kinds of typologies were
considered: Industrial survey, Research and Practice. The papers classified as Industrial Survey were those
ones describing interviews performed within operative organizations for understanding if and how they were
facing the problem of the alignment between different entities and with reference to which abstraction level.
The Research papers were those ones proposing innovative strategies for managing the alignment. The papers
classified as Practice were those describing experiences for experimenting defined strategies. Research
Surveys and Systematic Reviews were also searched, but no journals published these kinds of study.
Table 3 shows that, with reference to the typology, the papers were about uniformly distributed in almost
all the considered journals. In addition, the belonging to a certain typology was not exclusive, as some papers
were classified as research ones, but also discussed practice experiences, or were industrial survey and in the
same time experimented some alignment approach. In particular, some journals, such as Expert Systems with
Applications and Long Range Planning, were mainly oriented to present new alignment strategies and
experiment them in practical experiences, instead of discussing the alignment status within organizations. On
the other hand, the papers of other journal, such Journal of Business Research and Information and
Organization, presented the results of industrial investigations. In some case, the results of the Industrial
surveys were used for defining alignment strategies adapt to the investigated organizations. At this point, the
performed analysis tried to understand the way the papers listed in Table 1 faced the alignment topic. The
results of the analysis showed that they considered different aspects of the alignment and analyze it at different
abstraction levels. This preliminary analysis indicated that more of the 50% of the papers proposed new
strategies articulated in different phases, each of which facing a particular aspect. Also reading other literature,
the main aspects that an alignment strategy should at least consider are the following three: Modeling,
Alignment evaluation, Evolution execution.
All the approaches proposed by the analysed papers did not offer any technological support to the proposed
solutions. A tool was proposed just in one of the papers published in the Int. J. Production Economics and in
the one of Information and Software Technology.
Almost all the considered journals consider the modelling and more than 50% of the analysed papers treat
modelling techniques and methods. On the contrary, many journals do not include papers, published in the
analysed period, dealing with the alignment evaluation, and only the 27% of the papers consider this aspect.
This motivate the content of the next section that analyses various aspects of the modelling strategies included
in the papers of some of the journals. In particular, Table 4 highlights that the journals presenting the larger
number of solutions regarding this aspect are the first two: Journal Information & Management and Journal of
Strategic Information Systems. In fact, they exhibit the higher percentage of published papers. Finally, the
kind of verification presented in the selected papers was analysed.
Three kinds of verifications were considered. The first kind concerned the execution of simple case studies,
very often performed in-vitro in a laboratory. The second kind regarded the execution of experiences on the
field with the collaboration of a working organization. Then, empirical studies were considered. Table 5
shows that the performed verifications were mainly executed on the field and in empirical study. In addition,
the journals that published a higher number of papers regarding alignment, were also those that paid more
attention to these kinds of experiences.
Table 4. Alignment activities treated in the Science Direct papers
Journal Count Modeling Approach Alignment Evaluation Count % Prop. Count % Prop. Journal Information & Management 16 12 75% 26% 5 31% 20% Journal of Strategic Information Systems 7 6 85% 13% 1 14% 4% Journal of Operations Management 5 3 60% 6% 2 40% 8% Industrial Marketing Management 5 3 60% 6% 1 20% 4% Expert Systems with Applications 5 4 80% 8% 3 60% 12% Int. J. Production Economics 5 2 40% 4% 0 0% 0% Long Range Planning 4 1 25% 2% 3 75% 12% Government Information Quarterly 4 2 50% 4% 0 0% 0% Journal of Business Research 3 0 0% 0% 1 33% 4% Int. Journal of Information Management 3 1 33% 2% 0 0% 0% Hospitality Management 3 2 66% 4% 2 66% 8% Journal of Purchasing & Supply Management 2 1 50% 2% 0 0% 0% Int. Journal of Project Management 2 1 50% 2% 0 0% 0% Information and Software Technology 2 1 50% 2% 0 0% 0% Information and Organization 2 0 0% 0% 0 0% 0% Other 22 7 31% 15% 6 27% 25% Sum 90 46 24
Table 5. Kind of performed experimentation
Journal Count studyCase study%Case On the field On the field % Empirical studies Empirical Studies % Journal Information & Management 16 3 18% 10 62% 11 68% Journal of Strategic Information Systems 7 2 28% 3 42% 2 28% Journal of Operations Management 5 1 20% 3 60% 4 80% Industrial Marketing Management 5 0 0% 1 20% 1 20% Expert Systems with Applications 5 1 20% 1 20% 2 40% Int. J. Production Economics 5 1 20% 0 0% 1 20% Government Information Quarterly 4 2 50% 2 50% 0 0% Long Range Planning 4 0 0% 1 25% 1 25% Hospitality Management 3 0 0% 2 66% 2 66% Int. Journal of Information Management 3 1 33% 1 33% 1 33% Journal of Business Research 3 0 0% 2 66% 1 33% Information and Organization 2 0 0% 0 0% 2 100% Information and Software Technology 2 0 0% 1 50% 1 50% Int. Journal of Project Management 2 0 0% 0 0% 1 50% Journal of Purchasing & Supply Management 2 0 0% 0 0% 1 50% Others 22 10 50% 12 54% 8 36% Sum 90 24 26% 39 43% 39 43%
5. Modeling strategies in the analysed papers
The modelling phase is necessary to understand which is the information that the considered alignment
approach uses for analyzing the alignment at the considered abstraction level and if enough knowledge is
available for performing the task. All the entities involved by the alignment analysis should be modelled, so to
exclude all the business and technological details that are not relevant for the study to be conducted.
As previously explained, the second paper of the performed literature review focused on the aspects dealing
with the modelling activities. The two journals that most dealt with this aspect were Journal Information &
Management and Journal of Strategic Information Systems. The aim of the analysis was to investigate the
completeness of the available information regarding the existence of modeling techniques and the possibility
of representing the elementary entities involved in the alignment analysis and related reciprocal relationships.
Moreover, the maturity of an analyzed modeling approach was investigated by verifying if its definition
depended on other approaches and if it was already applied to case studies or working contexts. In particular,
the following questions were used as drivers for conducting the review: Are models to represent alignment
used? Are models to represent the separate entities used? Is the proposed model based on existing research
approaches? Is the modeling automatically supported? Was the proposed modeling approach applied to case
studies?Was the proposed modeling approach applied on the field?
The results were obtained by analyzing the documentation related to the considered strategy and assigning
as answer one of the following value to the questions above: Yes, indicating that the information required by
the question was clearly and completely described; No, indicating that the analyzed documentation did not
consider the specific aspect; Partially, indicating that the aspect indicated in the question was only partial
addressed; Not clear, indicating that the documentation did not clearly describe the information needed.
Table 6 shows that in the large part of the considered papers, models are used to represents the alignment.
But only half of the reviewed papers used specific models for representing the separate entities involved in the
Table 8. Involved entities
Involved Entities Paper
Business Strategy S2,S5,S8,S7,S9,S10,S13, S3,S22,S20,S23,S IT strategy S5, S8,S10,S13, S IT investment S8,S Business performance S7, S8,S Business Structure S10,S20,S IT Structure S10,S13, S20,S Business process S3, S13, S Organization’s structure S Human resource S ERP Strategy, Time cost, Financial Benefits S Critical success factor S IT systems S3,S Business objectives, E-business performance, E-commerce strategy, E-commerce strength and opportunities
S
Business rule S14,S Service systems S Environmental uncertainty, Information intensity, Business dependence on It, IT participation in Business Planning, IT Plan, Business Plan, Competitive advantage
S16, S
IS managers, Systems development methodologies S Goal (enterprise level), Functional (scenario level), Data, Output misfits (activity level) S IS Strategy, Corporate Strategy S20,S Organization’s IS S Technical elements of IT Infrastructure, Human elements of IT Infrastructure, Process elements of IT Infrastructure
S
IS/IT manager, Business manager S Infrastructure, Application S Organisational infrastructure and processes S IT infrastructure and processes S22,S IT Sub-Unit S IS Capability,IS Compentencies S Business and technical skills, knowledge, experience S
Table 9 describes the modelling techniques used in the analysed papers. Many papers consider the SAM –
Strategic Alignment Model – model [13]. It is useful to treat the IS strategy alignment and becomes a support
for a collaborative process between the business strategy, business organisation, IS infrastructure, and IT
strategy, at two different abstraction level of the alignment: functional and strategic. The Path model is used to
organize different variables. In particular, in S9, hypotheses are considered, having as a starting point, the
importance of the strategic alignment, and motivations and success of the ERP projects. The model captures
the relationships between the degree of success of ERP projects, the associated business process changes, and
subsequent internal efficiency benefits. Then, it captures the impact of internal process efficiency on customer
and financial benefits. Paper S10 adopts the gestalt research model considering a perspective of fit, and
looking at a large number of variables that collectively define a meaningful and coherent slice of
organizational reality. The Business rules services model is considered in S14. It provides high level services
and functions that evolve during the maturity and expands the scope of the business rules deployments across
an enterprise. The Business Rules Deployment Maturity Model identifies maturity along five dimensions,
including organizational scope, ownership, structure, development responsibility, and implementation
responsibility. In addition, many analysed papers define their own measurement approach. Finally, many
papers apply the proposed approach as indicated in Table 10. In particular, they include applications on the
field and empirical studies.
Table 9. Used Modelling techniques
Model Information & Management Journal Journal of Strategic Information Systems
SAM Strategic Alignment Model S6,S15 S22,S20,S Path model S Gestalt model of strategic alignment S Business rules deployment maturity model S14, S Business rules tasks/services model S UML model S Integrated Model of Alignment within IT unit - adapted from Luftman and Kempaiah (2007)
S
A model of the IS capability(Influenced by the work of Caldeira (1998))
S
Other S4,S3,S7,S11, S13, S
Table 10. Kind of the application of the proposed approach
Type Information & Management Journal Journal of Strategic Information Systems
Case Study S2,S3,S14 S20,S On the field S4,S3,S5,S6,S7,S10, S11,S12,S16, S13 S17,S18,S23, Empirical Study S5,S6,S7,S8,S9,S10,S11,S13, S17,S
6. Conclusions
The alignment between business and information systems assumed a growing relevance in the last years.
This research issue was addressed in several researches proposing numerous methods, techniques and tools.
This paper proposes a literature review to evaluate different approaches, with aim of discovering similarity,
maturity, capability to measure, to model to asses and to evolve the alignment. This kind of investigation is
aimed to support and address future research concerning the alignment. Indeed, it is necessary to understand
what are the aspects considered in the literature of this area with a systematic approach.
The proposed analysis was applied to the research works regarding the alignment topics published in
Journal Information & Management and the Journal of Strategic Information System, and the results of the
evaluation is presented. From the conducted study it emerges that the modeling, measurement and evolution
phases of an alignment approach are not adequately addressed in the analyzed strategies. Obviously these
results need the confirmation of a wider investigation involving more and more research approaches. Indeed,
this is the main future work on which the authors are working.
[27] Becker, A. L., Prikladnicki, R., J. L. N.,2008. Audy: Strategic Alignment of Software Process Improvement Programs Using QFD, BIPI’08, May 13, 2008, Leipzig, Germany. ACM 978-1-60558-041-8/08/05. [28] Kitchenham, B., 2007 for performing Systematic Literature Reviews in Software Engineering Version 2 EBSE Technical Report EBSE-2007-01 Software Engineering Group School of Computer Science and Mathematics Keele University Keele, Staffs ST5 5BG, UK and Department of Computer Science University of Durham Durham, UK 9 July. [29] Pai, Madhukar., McCulloch, Michael., Gorman, Jennifer D., Pai, Nitika, Enanoria, Wayne, Kennedy, Gail, Tharyan, Prathap, Colford, John, M. Jr., 2004. Systematic reviews and meta-analyses: An illustrated, step-by-step guide, The National Medical Journal of India, 17(2), pp 84-95. [30] Kitchenham, B., Mendes, E., Travassos, G., 2007. A Systematic Review of Cross- vs. Within-Company Cost Estimation Studies, IEEE Trans on SE, 33 (5), pp. 316-329. [31] Sulayman, M., Mendes, E., 2009. A Systematic Literature Review of Software Process Improvement in Small and Medium Web Companies, In Advances in Software Engineering. D. Slezak et al., Ed. Springer-Verlag, Berlin, 1--8. [32] Aversano, L., Marulli, F., Tortorella, M., 2010 Traceability Links between Business Activities and Software Components, Proc. of Conference on ENTERprise Information Systems, CENTERIS 2010, Advances in Software Engineering, Communications in Computer and Information Science. Springer-Verlag, 2010, pp-394.
Appendix A. The analysed papers
Considered papers from Journal Information & Management
S1. Huisman, M., Iivari, J., 2006. Deployment of systems development methodologies: Perceptual congruence between IS managers and systems developers, 43(1), pp-49. S2. Wu, J., Shin, S., Heng, M.S., 2007. A methodology for ERP misfit analysis, 44(8), pp-680. S3. Peak, D., Guynes, C., Kroon, V., 2005. Information technology Alignment Planning—a case study. 42(4), pp-633. S4. Kearns, G. S., 2005 An electronic commerce strategic typology: insights from case studies, 42(7), pp-1036. S5. Cumps, B., Martens, D., De Backer, M., Haesen, R., Viaene, S., Dedene, G., Baesens, B., Snoeck, M., 2009. Inferring comprehensible business/ICT alignment rules. 46(2), pp-124. S6. Chen, L., 2010. Business–IT alignment maturity of companies in China. 47(1), pp-16. S7. Johnson, A. M., Lederer, A. L., 2010 CEO/CIO mutual understanding, strategic alignment, and the contribution of IS to the organization, 47(3), pp-149. S8. Byrd, T. A., Lewis, B. R., Bryan, R. W.,2006 The leveraging influence of strategic alignment on IT investment: An empirical examination. 43(3), pp-321. S9. Velcu, O., 2004. Strategic alignment of ERP implementation stages: An empirical investigation. 47(3), pp-166, April 2010. S10. Bergeron, F., Raymond, L., Rivard, S.: Ideal patterns of strategic alignment and business performance. 41(8), pp-1020. S11. Fink, L., Neumann, S., 2009. Exploring the perceived business value of the flexibility enabled by information technology infrastructure, 46(2), pp-99. S12. Choe, J., 2003. The effect of environmental uncertainty and strategic applications of IS on a firm’s performance, 40(4), pp-268. S13. Newkirk, H. E., Lederer, A. L,2006. The effectiveness of strategic information systems planning under environmental uncertainty, 43(4), pp-501. S14. Nelson, M., Peterson, J., Rariden, R. L., Sen, R., 2010. Transitioning to a business rule management service model: Case studies from the property and casualty insurance industry. 47(1), pp-41. S15. Aerts, A.T., Goossenaerts, J.B. , Hammer, D. , Wortmann, J.,2004. Architectures in context: on the evolution of business, application software, and ICT platform architectures, 41(6), pp-794. S16. Kearns, G. S., Lederer, A. L.,2004 The impact of industry contextual factors on IT focus and the use of IT for competitive advantage, 41(7), pp. 899-919.
Considered papers from Journal of Strategic Information Systems
S17. Mohdzaher B. Mohdzain, John M. Ward, 2007. A study of subsidiaries’ views of information systems strategic planning in multinational organizations,16 pp. 324–352. S18. Dhaliwal, J., Onita, C., G., Poston, R., Zhang, X., P., 2011. Alignment within the software development unit: Assessing structural and relational dimensions between developers and testers, 20 pp. 323– S19. Peppard, J., Ward, J., 2004 strategic information systems: towards an IS capability,13 pp. 167– S20. Boonstra, A., Broekhuis, M., van Offenbeek, M., Wortmann, H.,2011. Strategic alternatives in telecare design Developing a value- configuration-based alignment framework, 20 pp. 198– S21. Beard, J., W., Sumner, M., 2004. Seeking strategic advantage in the post-net era: viewing ERP systems from the resource-based perspective, 13 pp. 129– S22. Wijnhoven, F., Spil, T., Stegwee, R., Tjang A Fa. R.,2006. Post-merger IT integration strategies: An IT alignment perspective, 15 pp. 5– S23. Avison, D., Jones, J., Powell, P., Wilson, D., 2004. Using and validating the strategic alignment model, 13 pp. 223–246.
1-s2 business alignments strategy on michel porteret low
Course: Business law (301)
University: Jimma University
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