Achieving and Maintaining IS/IT Alignment in Organizations

Sammanfattning: The alignment between IS/IT and business is one of the ways to achieve a significant competitive advantage for any organization. It is more important nowadays since any organization can buy any technology in the open market, so technologies themselves don’t give a significant competitive advantage.  Although the concept of the alignment has two decades of the history, it still has a lot of controversial issues and knowledge gaps such as uncertain understanding of the essence of the concept, the complexity of practical implementation and not paying attention to the social dimension of the alignment, i.e. the importance of mutual understanding and collaboration of IT and business executives. The current research aims to investigate the concept of alignment and finds out how an organization can achieve and maintain the IS/IT alignment. Also, this study explores the importance of the social dimension in the alignment concept, clarifies the essence of the IS/IT alignment and investigates how some theoretical concepts can really work in practice. There are many evidences in information systems management literature which describe that strategic alignment is necessary for profit organizations but there are very few which mention that strategic alignment is also important in non-profit academic institutions. During our current research we investigate how this concept works in Linnaeus University and how important it is to achieve and maintain an alignment in any university. In order to achieve the goal of the current research, the relevant information systems management literature was reviewed from a new perspective – a resource-based theory and a unified framework was proposed as a base for the further practical investigation. This research is based on a qualitative approach. By using a qualitative approach, we won’t miss anything important and can determine the maximum number of respondents' opinions. The primary data was collected by conducting private semi-structured interviews. The respondents are employees of a big nonprofit organization with the implemented business strategy, IT department and several information systems in use – Linnaeus University. The data were presented and analyzed according to the research questions and presented framework. The current study demonstrates the concept more clearly and tries to reassess the structure of IS/IT alignment. This research provides «a fresh look» at the concept of IS/IT alignment.