Alignment of Business and IT Strategy Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words

Alignment of Business and IT Strategy - Essay ExampleHowever, it is yet to be determined that alignment issues exist, and if they do how to control for these gaps. The results showed that to enhance strain strategy there must be a focus on the organizational vision and improvement of communication of dividing line strategy and vision. The alignment of the two organizational elements, were concluded to be directly affected by the coherence of a business department. Overall, it was recommended that a robust business architecture be developed, and that the organization create a separate and centralized IT department.During the past three decades IT ahs become essential to business operations. Initially IT was distributed over departments alter specialized and limited in application. However, the authors do not provide insights as to why IT increased and spread only examples of how. A common solution in the past was to have a separate IT department however this was found to limit effe ctive communication between IT department and other departments. The suggestion of IT departments reporting directly to management can create internal politics. Management often prioritizes the issues and this can lead to resentment of IT staff by the end users in other parts of the organization. The isolation of IT strategy can also draw a significant amount of resources away from the overall business strategy. As a consequence, non-alignment increases costs in time, m one and only(a)y and organizational harmony. 3.0 Literature Review Since the early 1980s alignment of IT and business strategy has been realized as a unfavourable need. The primary inhibitors identified over time have included the IT department not prioritizing efficiently and IT management lacking leadership. Models have been developed such as 1) Strategic Integration Systems Planning (SISP) and 2) strategic integration across the entire organization. Solutions to date for effective alignment are 1) communication and understanding 2) business self-control and accountability for return on IT investments 3) rapid strategy development driven by climatic business changes and 4) enhance the internal competencies of the business. 4.0 Method The method utilise to include the Alignment of Business and IT (ABIT) department of the Fortune 50 company to aid in the coordination of the project. The ABIT department created a list of potential employees who were considered to have a balanced perspective. This is a limitation isnt that a random sample was not selected, and so the results cannot be generalized to other organizations, as the sample is not representative of the wider population. Instead, selection criteria could have been used to operationalize what a balanced perspective was. Three groups were created 1) one having a business perspective 2) one having an IT perspective and 3) one having a balanced perspective. However, a pre-test could have been done first to identify a priori knowledge and to place people in groups based on their contemporary knowledge.The questions for the interviews were developed with the aid of ABIT to identify gaps, however no information is given as to how these items were selected and if they were tested for their reliability and validity. Each group was interviewed with questions