Mastering the Social IT/Business Alignment Challenge

The crucial role of IT/business alignment for business value of IT has been investigated for more than two decades. While both the intellectual and the social dimension of alignment received considerable attention at strategic level, only few studies have provided insights into alignment at non-strategic levels. With the intellectual dimension being quite well understood, this work focuses particularly on the social dimension of alignment, addressing aspects like shared understanding, common language, shared domain knowledge, and interaction quality between business and IT. Furthermore, there is a lack of research on how to achieve and maintain social alignment, making it difficult to develop guidelines for practice in this important area. This paper presents a multi-level construct for social alignment and adopts an IT governance perspective in order to identify specific practices and investigate their impact on social alignment. Using a qualitative approach by conducting a series of case studies, this research aims to contribute to our understanding of key IT/business alignment antecedents (or managerial actions) and how they influence social alignment.