Creating business value with information technology
Measuring strategic alignment in small firms
ISCNZ '96 Proceedings of the 1996 Information Systems Conference of New Zealand (ISCNZ '96)
IT Governance: How Top Performers Manage IT Decision Rights for Superior Results
IT Governance: How Top Performers Manage IT Decision Rights for Superior Results
Ideal patterns of strategic alignment and business performance
Information and Management
Executives' perceptions of the business value of information technology: a process-oriented approach
Journal of Management Information Systems - Special issue: Impacts of information technology investment on organizational performance
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The challenge of aligning Information Technology (IT) to business has often been cited as a key issue by IT executives. This paper presents a simple, flexible, and easy-to-use instrument that measures the alignment maturity between business and IT and identifies major gaps. The proposed instrument is based on Luftman's “Strategy Alignment Maturity Model” (SAMM); it directly encodes all attributes of SAMM alignment areas using a unidimensional framework. The instrument supports multiple levels of analysis with minimum assumptions about data using non-parametric statistical tools. In addition, the instrument provides an aggregation procedure to summarize the alignment maturity level for high-level executives. The instrument can also be customized to incorporate the contextual parameters of a company. In addition to the development of the instrument, this paper also shows how this instrument was applied to assess the alignment maturity level between IT and business in a rapidly growing company that had recently been publicly listed. The instrument was successful in identifying six major gaps for the company across the various alignment areas. These gaps were benchmarking, business metrics, strategic business planning, inter / intra organizational learning, architectural integration, and the impact of IT on business processes.