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Strategic Alignment of Information Technology, Information Systems and Organisational Change: Practice and Performance

Information Technology (IT) is used to support the effective operation of organisations. It follows therefore that any planned business improvements and/or IT changes should be ‘aligned’ so that computing facilities continue to remain appropriate as organisations evolve [4]. The BASE framework [1, 2, 3] offers one approach to managing such co-evolution. Unfortunately, in many organisations, the relationship between IT development and business improvement is largely informal, with a resulting weak alignment between business and IT changes. An investigation of four organisations was undertaken to develop a better understanding of the factors that might be inhibiting a stronger implementation of co-evolutionary change. The four organisations selected for the study all have extensive experience of IT use, are significantly dependent on IT, and their IT strategies appear to be developed in reasonably close collaboration with business goals. Two organisations were involved in manufacturing, one in telecommunications and the other a local government authority. The main objectives of the investigation were to assess the extent to which organisations: create strategic plans for their evolution; plan and implement IT changes in conjunction with organisational change; and make use of Information Systems (IS) models and align them with IT and organisational change. The consensus views and operating procedures of the organisations were compared to assess how they matched up to a proposed computing-business aligned process acquired from documented good practice [4, 5, 6, 7]. Documentary evidence supported and supplemented the information gathered through structured interviews and questionnaires. The core issues were examined at a number of different management levels under four categories: Strategic Planning; IT and Organisational Change; IS and Organisational Change; and the particular approaches to organisational change adopted by each company. Information was sought on ‘practice’ and ‘performance’ through questions on how computing and business changes are currently performed and the perceived level of achievement in each case. The results revealed that although all the organisations do create strategic plans, they are insufficiently detailed to be implemented effectively and are short-term in their outlook. Organisations can be successful without the benefit of ‘detailed’ plans, but the plans were open to misinterpretation. It could be argued, however, that loose strategic plans leave room for more creative implementation. Also, in a rapidly changing marketplace, long-term plans may be inaccurate and a poor motivator for change in the short term. Strategic planning gives a basis for determining how an IS and its supporting IT should evolve. The investigation revealed the almost complete absence of IS modelling in the organisations suggesting that the IS concept is not well established. Its importance, however, was recognised and its absence created problems in linking together separately developed IT systems. In effect, organisations were typically making IT decisions directly against broad organisational goals, which then made system integration very difficult. This paper describes the results of the investigation giving some insight into the way that these organisations manage strategic alignment between IT, IS and organisational change and raises issues with regards to future research in this area.