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Aligning in practice: from current cases to a new agenda

journal contribution
posted on 2015-11-06, 11:39 authored by Robert Galliers, Anna Karpovsky
Although there is extensive literature on IT/IS-business alignment, we argue that the topic’s current research trajectory is limited given the concept’s predominantly static focus to date. While the process perspective on alignment is a promising avenue to study the phenomenon’s dynamic nature, we still know little about what it is that organizational actors actually do, on a day-to-day basis, to align IS and related concerns with business imperatives. In order to address this lack of understanding regarding the practices of aligning, we argue for research that goes beyond abstract macro analysis of alignment processes to that which considers the actual micro practices of aligning. An analysis of the extant literature on the topic leads to the identification and classification of aligning activities that are being undertaken in practice. We argue that this review and critical appraisal of the IT/business alignment field has the potential for substantive and insightful contributions to our understanding of alignment as it is enacted – in practice. Arising from the review, we discuss important new research themes that are to be addressed if research on alignment is to be demonstrably relevant.

History

School

  • Business and Economics

Department

  • Business

Published in

Journal of Information Technology

Volume

30

Issue

2

Pages

136 - 160 (25)

Citation

GALLIERS, R.D. and KARPOVSKY, A., 2015. Aligning in Practice: from current cases to a new agenda. Journal of Information Technology, 30(2), pp. 136-160.

Publisher

© Palgrave Macmillan

Version

  • VoR (Version of Record)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Publication date

2015

Notes

This paper is in closed access.

ISSN

0268-3962

Language

  • en

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