Alignment of business and IT strategy

Abstract

Strategic alignment between Business and IT is one of the most researched topics in academia and industry. The importance of this theme can be gauged from the fact that Business-IT alignment continues to be one of the top 3 concerns among CIO as per the latest survey done by SIM in 2007i as it was in the last few years. IT-Business alignment address both how IT is aligned (e.g. convergence, harmony, synthesized) with business and how business is aligned with IT. This project provides insights into the concepts of business-IT strategic alignment from a conceptual as well as in practice. It addresses two important issues one is about defining and clarifying the concepts of business-IT strategic alignment, finding the gap between them and second is to determine how to manage the strategic alignment. This study uses IIMB as an organization to study the current state of alignment between business and IT and how IT is being viewed upon. This is than compared with few of the universities in the world who have there IT strategy freely available on the net. Finally a set of recommendations based on literature and empirical study is made on how IIMB should go about designing the IT organization and how the alignment can be achieved.