Start Date
12-16-2013
Description
Our research addresses one of the most conspicuous and enduring issues facing IT practitioners: how to align a firm’s IT resources with its business needs. Past work in this area has been largely atheoretical and sometimes inconsistent. We seek to provide an internally consistent explanation of how organizations achieve alignment and thereby improve business performance. Our work differs from past work in that we view IT alignment as a dynamic process, drawing on the lenses of three well-supported, overarching theories that have dominated organizational-level research over the past decade: institutional theory, punctuated equilibrium theory, and complexity theory. Our study seeks to contribute by conducting the first multi-theoretic study of how IT alignment evolves, providing the first comparison of institutional theory, punctuated equilibrium theory, and complexity theory, and using a novel methodology that combines dual-case methods with simulations.
Recommended Citation
Burton-Jones, Andrew; Green, Peter; and Vessey, Iris, "Toward a Theoretically Consistent Explanation of Business-IT Alignment" (2013). ICIS 2013 Proceedings. 2.
https://aisel.aisnet.org/icis2013/proceedings/ResearchInProgress/2
Toward a Theoretically Consistent Explanation of Business-IT Alignment
Our research addresses one of the most conspicuous and enduring issues facing IT practitioners: how to align a firm’s IT resources with its business needs. Past work in this area has been largely atheoretical and sometimes inconsistent. We seek to provide an internally consistent explanation of how organizations achieve alignment and thereby improve business performance. Our work differs from past work in that we view IT alignment as a dynamic process, drawing on the lenses of three well-supported, overarching theories that have dominated organizational-level research over the past decade: institutional theory, punctuated equilibrium theory, and complexity theory. Our study seeks to contribute by conducting the first multi-theoretic study of how IT alignment evolves, providing the first comparison of institutional theory, punctuated equilibrium theory, and complexity theory, and using a novel methodology that combines dual-case methods with simulations.