A Conceptual Framework for Aligning Business and Information Systems from Organisational Learning Perspective
The three decades of ongoing executives’ concerns of how to achieve successful alignment between business and information technology shows the complexity of such a vital process. Most of the challenges of alignment are related to knowledge and organisatio
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Abstract The three decades of ongoing executives’ concerns of how to achieve successful alignment between business and information technology shows the complexity of such a vital process. Most of the challenges of alignment are related to knowledge and organisational change, and several researchers have introduced a number of mechanisms to address some of these challenges. However, these mechanisms pay less attention to multilevel effects, which results in a limited understanding of alignment across levels. Therefore, we reviewed these challenges from a multilevel learning perspective and found that business and IT alignment is related to the balance of exploitation and exploration strategies with the intellectual content of individual, group and organisational levels.
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Introduction
The challenges of aligning business and information systems have been identified in numerous studies; however, alignment continues to be one of the top five concerns of CIOs [18]. These challenges have been summarised into lack of knowledge among executives, unawareness of alignment importance, unknown strategy and lack of industry knowledge and organisational change [6]. According to Lee and Bai [19], these challenges are directly linked to the strategic alignment of business and information systems failure, which raises the need for an organisational learning mechanism. Fewer studies have introduced a mechanism at individual alignment [34], group alignment [31] and organisational alignment [12]. However, most of the proposed mechanisms have focused on one alignment level (see Table 1), which gives a contrary view on the nature of alignment multilevel effects [4]. H. Balhareth (*) • K. Liu Business Informatics, Systems and Accounting, University of Reading, Reading, RG6 6UD, UK e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] H. Linger et al. (eds.), Building Sustainable Information Systems: Proceedings of the 2012 International Conference on Information Systems Development, DOI 10.1007/978-1-4614-7540-8_3, © Springer Science+Business Media New York 2013
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Table 1 Sample of published mechanisms in business–IT alignment Source Henderson and Reich and Sabherwal Tan and Alignment Venkatraman [11] Benbasat [31] and Chan [33] Gallupe [34] Lee et al. [20] Mechanism Single loop and Social Strategy Extension of Social dimension double loop dimension process social and technical and and dimension dimension intellectual strategy and dimension content intellectual dimension Focus level Organisation Group Organisation Individual and Group and group organisation
The dynamic nature of achieving alignment requires the ongoing process of organisational learning to ensure continuous alignment between business and information systems [16,21]. Therefore, in order to understand alignment mechanisms from a multilevel perspective, a framework is needed to describe the flow of knowledge creation, knowledge interpretation, knowledge integration and knowledge utilisation across the intellectual content of indiv
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