Business and IT: Beyond Alignment

The relationship between business and IT has been a persistent topic of discussion both in academia and among practitioners in the past decades. The business-IT alignment, or strategic alignment, is commonly viewed as an important component and driver to optimize business performance. After reviewing the literature on business-IT alignment and on the evolution of the alignment concept and related models, the authors view that current alignment discussion is still biased towards conceiving information systems mainly as subordinate and separate operative resources rather than as core value assets of the business. As alignment perspectives are inbuilt into existing IT governance models and frameworks, it is important to understand the evolution and the ontological foundations and assumptions of the alignment discourse. In this paper, the authors explore future directions for the business-IT alignment concept, which would be better in line with the fast moving and information-intensive contemporary business environment, where opportunities, business models and markets are shaped by the influx of new technologies and capabilities.