A comparison of the views of business and IT management on success factorsfor strategic alignment

This paper reports on a study to determine whether there are any significan t differences in perspectives of IT and business managers on what factors c ontribute to successful strategic alignment using Henderson and Venkatraman 's strategic alignment model as its framework, A general survey was underta ken over a range of industries and results indicated that the two perspecti ves were largely equivalent, except for their overall perception of the fac tors that contributed to success in strategic alignment. However, detailed case studies on container terminal operators showed very different patterns ; this suggested that successful alignment of IT in industries which are hi ghly IT-dependent would require very different perspectives of both IT and business managers although these are still convergent within the organisati on. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.