ON THE CONCEPTUALIZATION OF IT ALIGNMENT: MEASURING ALIGNMENT OF IT PROJECT PORTFOLIO
Yasser Rahrovani, Ali Kermanshah, Alain Pinsonneault · Journal of the Association for Information Systems · 2011
While alignment has received extensive attention in IT research, up to now, we have predominately focused on the current business value of IT by studying the alignment of the existing IT applications (i.e., IT operation) with the current strategies.However, given the highly dynamic environmental context, we also need to think about the alignment of the developing IT applications (i.e., IT projects) that will lead to future business value of IT.The paper is about rethinking the notion of strategic alignment to include future oriented dimension by conceptualizing and operationalizing alignment of the developing IT applications.We develop a multilevel tool that emergently measures portfolio alignment based on its individual IT projects.In the empirical section we test the proposed tool in a large organization.Finally, the implications of including IT projects in the alignment have been discussed.