Strategic and Tactical Business-IT Alignment Barriers in Organizations Acting in Sweden

Abstract

In research, many barriers to BITA are presented based on different theoretical frameworks. However, these barriers are studied either from a pure theoretical perspective or with limited empirical scope. This consequently hinders the achievement of BITA in organizations. In this article the practitioners view of barriers to BITA are investigated aiming at producing a list of barriers which practitioners can use as a ground for better achievement of BITA. The list of barriers was identified by conducting three in-depth case studies on multinational organizations acting in Sweden along with two focused group discussions of researchers, and followed by a survey on 74 large and medium sized organizations on the Swedish market. The result of this study is a list of 45 barriers to BITA from the perspectives of business and IT practitioners.

Exploring the Misalignment between Business and Information Technology on the Implementation of Balanced Scorecard: Case Study of State-Owned Telecommunication Companies in Indonesia

“…The misalignment factor found in this study is consistent with past research, which found that lack of IT skills results in the misalignment occur between a business and IT (Alghazi et al 2018;Carañana et al 2016;Coltman et al 2015;El-Mekawy et al 2015;Kurti et al 2013;Weiss and Anderson 2004). Weiss & Anderson (2004) concluded that the failure to develop, sustain and get the necessary expertise is a significant obstacle in aligning business and IT.…”

“…The misalignment factor found in this study is consistent with past research, which found that the communication gap between business and IT is the main reason why the misalignment factors happen (Alaceva and Rusu 2015;Alghazi et al 2020;El-Mekawy et al 2015;Ullah and Lai 2013). According to Sauer & Yetton (1997), the basic concept is that IT should maintain communication to represent the business's management needs.…”

“…Our studies share the same results as previous results from El-Mekawy et al ( 2015) that highlighted the business department perceived low IT value because they still do not see IT's value but instead sees it as a cost. El-Mekawy et al (2015) also noted that a one-sided partnership is one of the main reasons the misalignment occurs in the group because IT is not seen as a strategic partner by the business department.…”

“…Even though we are in core or product development, we did not get too much attention." (Interviewee 2) Past mistakes or successes in IT execution, on the other hand, will minimize or improve the potential to show IT value(El-Mekawy et al 2015). It is just like what happened in Company B when the IT division succeeds to bring the sales increase in 2016 by developing a mobile application to request fibre optic instalment.…”

The Influence of Organizational Politics on Business-IT Alignment

“…Therefore, it can be argued that greater focus on research should be put on understanding how BITA can be achieved in practice and the factors influencing BITA maturity. While a substantial amount of research has been conducted on identifying barriers to alignment (Luftman et al, 1999;El-Mekawy et al, 2015a;Alaceva & Rusu, 2015) and on successfully achieving and sustaining alignment (Chan, 2002), the influence of organizational politics (OP) on BITA is missing from the research literature. Additionally, Luftman, et al (2015) states that a vast majority of current BITA models lack political considerations.…”