A systematic literature review on business-IT misalignment research

Abstract

There has been a large body of research on strategic alignment between business and information technology, which has also been summarised in several literature reviews. All of these studies describe that business-IT alignment has remained a focal point among business and IT leaders. However, little is known about a specific perspective, namely, on business-IT misalignment, on which, although some analytical works have been carried out over the last twenty years, no literature review has been summarised. The purpose of this article is to display and analyze relevant literature regarding business-IT misalignment and map the influential issues by conducting a systematic literature review. This study collected in sum 642 papers published from the Scopus and Google Scholar databases. Finally, 62 articles were selected for the systematic review. The study examined eight research questions for business-IT misalignment derived from recent, high-impact business-IT alignment literature reviews. Results are analyzed qualitatively to find a better understanding of the current body of knowledge in business-IT misalignment and to provide a research agenda.