Looking for efective ways of achieving and sustaining Business-IT alignment

Aligning Business and Information Technologies strategies has been a subject studied for a long time. Despite all the efforts, achieving and sustaining Business-IT alignment remains a challenge requiring even more agility nowadays to keep up with the competition in a turbulent organizational environment. Past contributions are uncovered in this paper calling particular attention to the development of Enterprise Architecture as a way of addressing this challenge. However, this should be a process to be carried out in the most effective ways looking especially at time and costs. Having proposed frameworks as a point of departure to reflect on the ways they may or may not work in practice, a dialogical action research is proposed for this work involving a close interaction with consultant companies. The resulting improved expertise both from the researcher and practitioners involved should allow for the identification of the most effective ways of achieving and sustaining Business-IT alignment.