Maturing Business and IT Alignment Capability; the Practitioner's View

Aligning IT and business needs is still one of the most important concerns for senior management. The message of Business and IT Alignment (BIA) is logical and undisputed, but implementation is apparently difficult. Luftman and Kempaiah conclude that business and IT alignment needs a tool that can provide an assessment of an organization''s level of alignment and a roadmap on how to improve alignment. A broadly used framework for assessing business and IT alignment maturity is Luftman''s Strategic Alignment Maturity (SAM) model. The paper presents a survey study into the perceived contribution of the different variables and sub-variables of the SAM model. We found that the perceived contribution of the variables are not equally spread and suggest a modification of the model.