Abstract

Nowadays more and more enterprises transform into service orientation to sustain their competitive advantage. In order to ensure the underlying information technology (IT) can help the transformation effectively, we aim to develop an IT-business alignment framework to assess the quality of alignment in the context of service-oriented enterprises. Based upon past literature, we propose three components of IT-business alignment: strategic alignment, operational alignment, and social alignment and study their contribution to customer service quality under different service integration level. Our data is collected from web questionnaires. The total data set constitutes a representative sample of n=300. Among all returned questionnaires, 96 were found to be complete and usable; this represented a response rate of 32 percent. A multiple regression analysis is conducted and derives the following three research findings: (1) Strategic alignment plays the most significant role in improving customer service quality compared with other two alignment factors and it becomes particularly influential to customer service quality when the enterprise has weak service integration. (2) Operational alignment contributes to customer service quality for enterprises with strong service integration (3) Social alignment effectively helps enterprises improve customer service quality no matter their service integration is weak or strong.

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