IT Business Alignment and IT Usage in Operational Processes: A Retail Banking Case

Managing the business value of IT-Services is an important aspect in the context of IT-Service quality management. This chapter introduced a framework for IT-Service value engineering and closes gaps in research and practical management in IT value management. The concept illustrates aspects of IT service value engineering and IT business alignment and the relation to IT service quality management. The Framework for IT service value engineering is made up of different management levels and a value engineering process. It integrates various concepts from IT and business value management in order to evaluate and improve the contribution of IT services towards overall business value.

Excellence in IT is a key enabler for the digital transformation of enterprises. To realize the vision of Digital Enterprises it is necessary to cope with changing business requirements and to align business and IT. In order to evaluate the contribution of Enterprise Architecture Management to these goals, our paper explores the impact of various factors to the perceived benefit of EAM in enterprises. Based on literature, we build an empirical research model. It is tested with empirical data of European EAM experts using a structural equation modelling approach. It is shown that changing business requirements, IT Business Alignment, the complexity of Information Technology infrastructure as well as enterprise architecture knowledge of Information Technology employees are crucial impact factors to the perceived benefit of EAM in enterprises.KeywordsEAMEmpirical researchBenefit of EAMUse of EAMEnterprise architecture managementStudyEuropean expertsIT business alignment

What follows is a methodology developed by the author for assessing a company’s alignment. Modeled after the Capability Maturity Model® developed by Carnegie Mellon’s Software Engineering Institute, but focused on a more strategic set of business practices, this tool has been successfully tested at more than 50 Global 2000 companies and is currently the subject of a benchmarking study sponsored by the Society for Information Management and The Conference Board.1 The primary objective of the assessment is to identify specific recommendations for improving the alignment of IT and the business.

Managing the business value of IT-Services is an important aspect in the context of IT-Service quality management. This chapter introduced a framework for IT-Service value engineering and closes gaps in research and practical management in IT value management. The concept illustrates aspects of IT service value engineering and IT business alignment and the relation to IT service quality management. The Framework for IT service value engineering is made up of different management levels and a value engineering process. It integrates various concepts from IT and business value management in order to evaluate and improve the contribution of IT services towards overall business value.

Organizations are facing the challenge of transforming their business models into digital firms, as companies are becoming part of the platform economy. The orchestration of the IT application landscape and strategic business–IT alignment is essential to gain transparency in surviving the digitalization. The important issues of IT and business alignment, cost reduction, organizational change, transformation, and fulfillment of legal requirements are becoming more important. The necessity of the “enterprise architect” rises importance. Enterprise architects do not, in general, consider themselves as active drivers for change. The research project answers the question of how are enterprise architects fostering business and IT alignment. The study focuses on an exploration in the evolution and changing role of the enterprise architect in the context of digital transformation. The research methodology consists of a systematic literature and applies a qualitative, explorative, and summative content analysis in the DACH region. Results indicate that fostering business and IT alignment require more than ever the role of an active intra-organizational networker and communicator in our complex digital organizational ecosystem. The profession of enterprise architects therefore has great opportunities but needs to transform the role from overseeing visualization to becoming the enabler for digitalization.

Alignment of the business and IT strategies of organization required to achieve business goals. Business IT Alignment approach via communication, consider the dimensions of organizational culture, top management support and vision implementation as key success factor. Unified Strategic Alignment Model aims to improving understanding of strategic alignment business and IT, consist of business strategy, IT strategy, IT infrastructure and process, organization infrastructure and process. This paper proposed a model SAM based on organizational culture and characteristic adopter of technology in case study hospital in Bandung (West Java). Organizational culture will influence dimensions of strategic alignment model. Clan culture as organizational culture and early majority as characteristic adopter technology in hospital can help organization to achieve business IT-alignment.

PurposeThis paper aims to present a dynamic model based on casual relationships among the most important effective factors on business–IT alignment in Agile businesses by using system dynamics modeling approach.Design/methodology/approachTo study the most important factors on agility and alignment, the data were collected by questionnaires filled by 201 experts and were analyzed by SPSS and PLS. Casual relationships among studied factors and efficiency coefficients of each factor were identified by fuzzy DEMATEL technique and analyzed by MATLAB and EXCELL. Finally, the dynamic model was plotted by VENSIM.FindingsAccording to the results, only “learning IT capabilities” are the most important casual factor that has the highest influence on the other factors. “Business responding capabilities” take the highest effect from the system, and “business sensing capabilities” are in the next rank.Practical implicationsThis study underpins effective IT deployment toward developing efficient IT capabilities to gain greater agility.Originality/valueThe dynamic capabilities view (DCV) has emerged as an influential theoretical and management framework in modern IS and agility researches. In this regard, we propose a conceptualization of dynamic capabilities in the form of an alignment model. Based on the dynamic capabilities, and on the alignment perspectives found in Henderson and Venkatraman’s seminal model, IT alignment is modeled as a process of reconfiguration of the firm’s IT and organizational resources, competencies and capabilities.

Organizations introduce changes to adapt to an agile context in a turbulent environment. These change often have an impact on business and information technology. In most cases, the change impacts organizational elements that make the adaptation not well defined, leaving out elements that can lead to misalignment. The change is realized in this article as a project, which will impact all the Business-IT alignment elements. It is important to know the scope of the impact in order to make a complete adaptation. By reviewing the literature, we found that there is no work dealing with this aspect. To fill this gap, we determine the impact of the project on the organization by considering of Business-IT alignment and we proceed with a comparison of the AS IS model of the organization with the TO BE model which is the target to be implemented keeping the system aligned. Accordingly, we propose a metamodel for change by the impact of the project on the Business-IT alignment and a set of rules and algorithms to predict the impact and adaptation. To make these contributions operational, the implementation of Change Business-IT Alignment Tool and demonstrate its applicability through a case study of an urban agency.

This paper presents virtualization technology that supports green computing among IT personnel in the public sector. The selection of effective technology in virtualization is crucial to reduce the negative impact of IT usage in the public sector by leveraging resources and maximizing the use of IT devices. Virtualization can provide important processes related to green computing implementation in the organization. However, the organization still faces problems in identifying suitable technology used by IT personnel in the organization. Thus, there is a need to understand the process to select the suitable technology based on the role of people, process, technology, and IT organization structure. The methodology comprises that the work process exploration, end-user segmentation, and technology evaluation process, which is validated by interviewing targeting IT personnel in government-based institutions in Malaysia that have in-house green data centers. The qualitative approach was adopted to understand the work activities of IT personnel and IT devices used to perform the task. A case study approach was used where the data was collected from open-ended interviews, observation, and report documents. The data was analyzed using a thematic analysis approach. Then, technology evaluation was conducted to select appropriate virtualization technologies to be used to support green computing in the IT work process by integrating four dimensions that consist of the people, process, technology, and IT organization structure. The results show a list of virtualization technology to support green computing based on the technology evaluation process.

A central question in the strategic management literature is one of how organizations achieve and maintain sustainable competitive advantage. While scholars in this area have explored this issue from many different perspectives, our understanding of the relationship between technology acceptance, usage, and competitive advantage is still incomplete. The papers in this special section (some of which were originally presented in a session on this topic in INFORMS 2008) focus on this issue. They present studies situated in an international context, underscoring the importance of technology to competitive advantage across different national contexts. They examine a rich array of technologies or technological infrastructures that have a bearing on the success of individuals and organizations, pointing to the complex relationship between technology and business outcomes. We present a brief summary of the papers below. The study “From IT deployment capabilities to competitive advantage: An exploratory study in China” by Jun Tian, Kanliang Wang, Yan Chen, and Bjorn Johansson uses a survey of Chinese firms to examine how organizations can deploy acquired information technologies to support and shape business strategies and value chain activities. The paper identifies three building blocks of IT deployment, namely strategic IT flexibility, business—IT partnership, and business—IT alignment, and empirically examines how these three constructs directly or indirectly influence competitive advantage. The study “ICT infrastructure for innovation” by Bendik Bygstad builds on a case study of the Norwegian company, Norwegian Corp., to examine how the concept of an enterprise service bus, applied at different levels, can provide insights into the innovation process both within and across different business units of an organization. The study illustrates how technologies can influence the development of organizational structures. The study “Knowledge management technology for organized crime assessment” by Petter Gottschalk presents a knowledge management technology stage model. This study examines how police organizations use information and communication technologies in intelligence and investigative work, and highlights the challenges these organizations face in applying and using new technologies to improve their functioning. The study “Successful and unsuccessful multicommunication episodes: Engaging in dialogue or juggling messages?” by JeanineW. Turner and N. L. Reinsch uses a critical incident technique to explore multicommunicating by individuals. Turner and Reinsch define multicommunicating as the act of engaging in more than one conversation at a time, and find that some technology pairings appear more conducive to multicommunicating than others. The respondents in their study provide a number of reasons why some episodes of multicommunicating are successful while others are not. D. Rau (*) :W. Zheng Northern Illinois University, DeKalb, IL, USA e-mail: drau@niu.edu

Business-IT Alignment (BITA) is still one of the top management concerns in many organizations due to its strategic benefits. Researchers have highlighted the importance of understanding the significance of BITA in improving organizational performance and gaining competitive advantage. BITA is a dynamic process, and organizations need to adjust it continuously. Moreover, there is still a need for new knowledge on the barriers in BITA in different organizations, like e.g., those from developing countries where were done a few research studies. Therefore, this research has focused on organizations from the banking sectors of The Gambia to identify the barriers in BITA. The research strategy used was survey research and the data was collected through semi-structured interviews combine with internal documents of the studied organizations and analyzed using thematic analysis. The study has identified in total 26 barriers in BITA from which eight are new barriers in BITA in the banking sector organizations of The Gambia. The results of the study contribute to BITA research and can help business and IT managers in attaining and sustaining business-IT alignment and improving their organizational performance.

The social network structure at the interface between a firm's business and IT units is of vital importance to business/IT alignment and hence an important IT governance object. Yet, there is a substantial gap in understanding the nature of these social structures and how they affect IT business value. Based on a literature review that comprises articles published in eight top IS journals since 2000, this paper identifies social network structure characteristics which represent antecedents of alignment. These are subsequently translated into precise concepts of social network analysis (SNA). The identification and formalization of such social network structures allow IT governance to implement social engineering mechanisms in order to influence the social network structure and thus business/IT alignment and IT value. Examples for such translated arguments are a high degree centrality of CIOs vis-a-vis other executives and strong ties in terms of cross-domain knowledge between the CIO and other executives.

Purpose- This paper aims to examine the impacts of ITCapability and its four sub-dimensions on the firm competitiveness at thelogistics sector. IT capabilities have four sub-dimensionsas IT infrastructure, IT business experience, IT relationship resources and IThuman resources. IT infrastructure capability refers to the combinate hardware,software, network resources and services. IT business experience, is an abilityto unify IT strategy and business strategy. IT relationship resource, is acapability to compound IT functions with business units and IT resources. IThuman resources stand for an organizational resource and capability. Methodology- The datawas collected from the national industry of logistics service providersassociated in the international forwarding associations UND by questionnairemethod. 450 questionnaires were distributed, 428 of them was returned (aresponse rate of 95%). Findings- All data was analysed by SPSSprogramme. First of all demographic characteristics of the respondents were presentedby the frequency analysis. Then correlation analyse was used and it was foundsignificant and positive relationships among IT Capability, its foursub-dimensions and competitiveness. At last regression analyses were used. Conclusion- The resultsof analyses showed that a firm’s IT capability and its sub dimensions havepositive effects on competitiveness, asproposed for this study.

The aim of this research is to understand how IT executives of different countries implement and perceive IT operational process improvement frameworks. We examine if IT operational frameworks, such as ITIL and CobiT, have an effect on the IT organization and on the relations between the IT organization and the business. While the implementation of such frameworks has been on the rise, limited research sets out to understand how the benefits of implementation evolve as organizations implement these frameworks. To answer this, two surveys were conducted to understand the perception of IT executives, one focusing on ITIL and the other on CobiT. Over 680 survey responses were collected and analysed. A total of 490 responses were received from companies that had implemented ITIL. We are interested in knowing the perceived benefits realized due to the ITIL implementation, the perceived maturity of the business-IT alignment, and the maturity of the ITIL processes implemented. Responses were used to compare how the benefits, challenges and maturity of the business-it alignment would evolve as the implementation maturity increases. Additional to these, further data was gathered from Australia and DACH (Austria, Germany and Switzerland) countries. A study is conducted to compare companies using ITIL in Australia, DACH countries, United Kingdom and United States, and shows that inter-organisational factors such as country, size and industry sector contribute to the variation in adoption of ITSM. Additionally, insights provide evidence that organizations implementing ITIL are concentrating on operational processes more than on tactical and strategical processes. Findings from this thesis also show that as the overall maturity of the ITIL implementation increases, so do the number of perceived realized benefits. When it comes to the challenges of implementation, results show that these decrease as the overall maturity of ITIL implementation increases. Findings also show that as the maturity of the implementation increases, so does the business-IT alignment. Further, a logistic model is completed to provide an understanding of which processes of ITIL are able to predict the realization of benefits. Processes which are likely to provide benefits are access management and financial management. The study was then replicated for IT organizations using CobiT. The focus is on understanding if the implementation of CobiT has an impact on business-IT alignment. As well the study concentrates on understanding if a positive impact is perceived due to the implementation of CobiT. In this survey, 190 usable responses were received from organizations using CobiT. Findings show that as the maturity of the CobiT implementation increases, so does the perceived business-IT alignment, especially in the later stages. Findings indicate that as maturity of implementation increases so does the perceived impact for all focus areas of IT governance. Using the approach developed from the Knowledge-Based View of the firm, we then explain why IT operational process improvement frameworks have an impact on the IT organization. We show that CobiT and ITIL contain characteristics of knowledge integration as proposed by Grant (1996). The thesis contributes to a better understanding of the benefits that IT operational process improvements, such as ITIL and CobiT, can provide to the organization.

BITAM: An engineering-principled method for managing misalignments between business and IT architectures