Aligning IT/IS with Business Strategy Re-Visited

This paper explores the co-relational process activities of information technology and systems (IT/IS) and business strategy alignment. The notion of “process” as being strategy and strategic alignment has been observed but not examined. Organizations are both complex and adaptive, and these attributes create significant challenges for managers when assessing strategic requirements. A need exists to further understand alignment as a process and embrace this concept when aligning business IT/IS with the strategic goals of the organisation. This highlights an important distinction of “process” that recasts the nature of congruence and reassesses the appropriateness and usefulness of current practice. The authors propose the use of principles underpinning complex adaptive systems as a way to re-orientate IT/IS alignment in a meaningful and more appropriate manner. The context for the study is the UK Health Service, and informed by a case analysis of 26 senior members from a Scottish Health Board.

Structuring SOA Governance

Companies’ IT Systems are confronted with constantly changing market conditions, new competitive threats and a growing number of legal regulations. The service-oriented architecture (SOA) paradigm provides a promising way to address these challenges at the level of a company’s IT infrastructure. These challenges, as well as the management of the newly introduced complexity and heterogeneity, are targeted by SOA Governance approaches. In recent years, a number of concrete frameworks for SOA Governance addressing these issues have been proposed. There is no holistic approach considering all proposed elements, consolidating them in order to form a universally applicable model. In this contribution, we motivate SOA Governance, investigate and compare different approaches, identify common concepts, and derive a generic model for governance of Service-oriented Architectures.

Analysing the Impact of Enterprise Governance of IT Practices on Business Performance

Enterprise governance of IT (EGIT) is about the definition and implementation of processes, structures and relational mechanisms that enable both business and IT people to execute their responsibilities in support of business/IT alignment and the creation of business value from IT-enabled business investments. In this field, practice-oriented guidance like COBIT and Val IT are often promoted as broad frameworks to implement enterprise governance of IT, but very little academic research is available that empirically supports the assumption that implementing EGIT practices, as defined by COBIT and Val IT, improve business performance. This article explores the relationship between Enterprise Governance of IT practices and business performance, and finds little support to identify a direct link between EGIT practices and business performance. However, clear empirical evidence is revealed demonstrating that the implementation of EGIT practices impacts the achievement of specific IT goals, which in turn impacts the achievement of specific business goals. A three-layered cascade is proposed to demonstrate the impact of EGIT practices, through IT goals, on business performance.

Detection of Strategies in IT Organizations through an Integrated IT Compliance Model

In the past few years, many frameworks and standards have been developed to cover different aspects of IT to provide best practices, such as COBIT, ITIL, CMMI, ISO/IEC 20000, ISO/IEC 38500 and ISO/IEC 27000, and improve IT governance and IT service management in organizations. This research presents how self-assessments for IT standards improve significantly the strategic and tactical evaluation of IT requirements. Self-assessments measure the state of an organization in relation to experts’ recommendations of a specific framework. As a result of the number and excellence of the current standards, the authors propose a Compliance Model (MOPLACO) that uses, as a starting point, a combination of self-assessments and standards to plan the early strategic and tactical stages of the IT departments.

A Research Journey into Enterprise Governance of IT, Business/IT Alignment and Value Creation

Enterprise governance of IT is a relatively new concept in literature, and is gaining more interest in the academic and practitioner’s world. Enterprise governance of IT addresses the definition and implementation of processes, structures and relational mechanism that enable both business and IT people to execute their responsibilities in support of business/IT alignment and the creation of value from IT-enabled business investments. This article introduces important theories and practices around Enterprise governance of IT based on joint research and practical experience of the authors (and editors-in-chief of this journal) within the Information Technology Alignment and Governance (ITAG) Research Institute (University of Antwerp Management School). The article is based on the authors’ 8-year journey into Enterprise Governance of IT and aims to outline the core themes of interest of this new International Journal on IT/Business Alignment and Governance. In this way, this introductory article paves the way for many more research initiatives within this challenging research domain.

Professional Analysts and the Ongoing Construction of IT Governance

This article addresses the role of the professional analysts as actors within the field of IT Governance. Through a content analysis of over 400 reports from the largest commercial research firm, instances of normative statements are identified and analyzed. With the intended target group of the reports being Chief Information Officers, the findings show that the content of IT Governance has changed during the last three years. This is discussed in relation to the role that professional analysts play in an ongoing construction of IT Governance. The article concludes by identifying possible risks and benefits involved in using professional analysts as sources for best-practice, as well as calling for a more practice-based definition of IT Governance.

Linking the Strategic Importance of ICT with Investment in Business-ICT Alignment

In this article, we introduce a framework that can be used by organizations as a positioning instrument to think of business-ICT alignment decisions in light of the strategic importance of ICT (Information and Communication Technology) in their organization. We make a distinction between organizations where ICT is of high strategic importance and those where ICT is of low strategic importance. Based on this difference we argue that heavily investing in business-ICT alignment processes, structures and roles (PSRs) will not necessarily always be beneficial when ICT is of low strategic importance to the business. Furthermore, organizations that have a minimalist approach to the use of ICT do not necessarily need to invest in business-ICT alignment PSRs. We explain the dynamics and possible migration scenarios of our proposed framework after testing the statistical significance of the relationship between the strategic importance of ICT and the investment in business-ICT alignment. We end this article with a short empirical study which combines survey and case study results. Both the framework and framework dynamics still need further empirical validation, preferably with longitudinal data. Therefore, we stress and acknowledge that many of the discussions in this article are still explorative in nature. However, this article illustrates the possibilities and the need for a more fine-grained approach to business-ICT alignment.

The Viable Governance Model

Empirical studies into the governance of Information Technology (IT) have advanced our understanding of the mechanisms used to control the management of IT. However, there has been relatively little research into the formulation of a theoretical model of IT governance that explains and organises the growing collection of mechanisms into a coherent whole. To further advance the concept of the corporate governance of IT, the Viable Governance Model (VGM) is proposed. The VGM is a theoretical model of governance based on the laws and principles of cybernetics as embodied in Stafford Beer’s Viable System Model (VSM). The VGM is used to formulate a series of design propositions or principles that may be used to guide the design and implementation of specific IT governance arrangements. The study draws on empirical studies or professional standards to establish how these theoretical design propositions may be satisfied in practice.

Prioritising and Linking Business Goals and IT Goals in the Financial Sector

In today’s complex and constantly changing business world, business/IT alignment is high on the agenda of executive management. To achieve such alignment, it is important that an organization should have a clearly established corporate mission and a well-defined support strategy and business goals. Furthermore, the translation into and linkage with the company’s IT strategy and goals must be carefully planned. However, these requirements appear to be rather difficult to meet in reality, so that companies must often look for additional practical guidance in identifying their principal business and IT goals, as well as in determining how these should be geared to one another. Therefore, a series of research steps has been designed for the purpose of providing pragmatic assistance in defining a cascade of business goals and supporting IT goals. This paper presents the results of a Delphi study conducted in the financial sector. It offers qualitative information on how to establish a firm set of business objectives, IT goals and their interrelationships. In addition, it provides some recommendations on how to adapt and fine-tune the proposed procedure with a view to either complementing the results or replicating them for other sectors of industry.

The Adoption of Open Source Desktop Software

More organizations are currently migrating toward open source desktop software (OSDS). However, such migration is complex. More insight into the process will assist decision makers in making a well-informed decision on whether or not to migrate to OSDS and in building a strong business case to support this decision. In this paper, the authors present the results of a qualitative study in seven Belgian organizations and report on why these organizations have adopted OSDS and how the migration was undertaken. These cases represent challenging adoptions of OSDS. Results indicate that providing added value for users can positively influence user perceptions. In addition, the authors found strong empirical support for the guidelines with respect to the migration to OSDS that have been proposed in academic literature.