Investigating business-IT alignment through multi-disciplinary goal concepts

The alignment of information technology (IT) with business strategies is optimal when harmony exists between organizational and system goals. Empirical evidence reveals that effective strategic alignment leads to superior financial performance for organizations. This observation has spurred extensive research into business-IT alignment. Yet, the issue of alignment remains a top concern for CIOs. We argue that the parochial view undertaken by past research into business-IT alignment is a probable cause for continuing system failures. Furthermore, strategic alignment research is limited and devoid within the requirements engineering discipline. In this paper, we highlight existing shortfalls of research in business-IT alignment, and bring to light insights that may be offered by other disciplines to augment this field. Subscribing to a multi-disciplinary perspective, we develop a goal-based framework that incorporates goals from various literatures in investigating business-IT alignment. One of the novelties of our proposed framework lies in its delineation between goals that have been originally assigned to stakeholders versus those interpreted by stakeholders. Additionally, the framework includes constructs at the strategic level for supporting the rationale of strategic level goals. We tested the usefulness and usability of this methodology in an organization with a newly developed information system founded on strategic business goals and reported lessons learnt from both researchers’ and practitioners’ perspectives.