Examining Tactical Information Technology — Business Alignment

The goal of strategic IT-business alignment has been to deploy IT applications that support business strategy. In spite of voluminous “strategic” IT plans and numerous studies on strategic IT-business alignment, accounts of wasted IT investments and deployment of business-irrelevant applications are rampant, indicating lack of alignment at the tactical level, that is, lack of execution-level processes addressing issues of resources, objectives and implementation-priority matching, between IT and the business. We answer the question: What are the aspects and outcomes of tactical IT-business alignment? We (1) identify six aspects of tactical IT-business alignment, and (2) show how they lead to four outcomes — implementation of planned applications, execution of IT-enabled aspects of business strategy, increased credibility of the IT function and increased business value from IT projects. Our results are based on qualitative primary data (45 hours of interviews with 28 IT and functional managers and company documents) from four organizations.