Business-IT Alignment Strategies: A Conceptual Modeling

Three commonly used business-IT alignment strategies are parallelism, profile-matching and leadership synergy. All these strategies provide alignment results for the moment but do not provide a sustainable framework over a period of time. As a result, business functions, especially IT function, once aligned with the core business, lose the alignment dynamics after a period of time. An alignment framework based on organization's maturity time-scale and capital allocation methodologies provides a premise on how business and IT can be aligned strategically over time. A transparent value system that allows business and IT assess the results of collaborative actions acts as a measuring scale of the effectiveness of that framework. The main theme of this paper is to propose a strategy framework that can be utilized by core business and IT function continually over the entire maturity life-cycle.