Strategic alignment

Many organizations struggle to make their technology investments pay off because IT plans drift away from what the business is trying to achieve. This book sets out the Strategic Alignment Model, a structure for connecting corporate objectives with IT strategy, systems architecture and supporting infrastructure. Its central idea is to weigh pressures from the external market against a company's internal strengths, so that information systems serve the enterprise more effectively.

The author organizes the discussion around four domains: Business Strategy, Organizational Infrastructure and Processes, IT Strategy, and IS Infrastructure and Processes. Two integration dimensions, along with alignments that cut across these domains, explain how IT spending can generate value. The text also introduces completeness, validity, consistency and comprehensiveness as standards for sound strategic IT planning.

Readers learn how strategic and functional integration help a firm find its position in both the IT marketplace and its product market. The book looks at cross-domain links between business strategy and IT architecture, and at how automation can reshape organizational processes. It also offers ways to compare planning methods, limit bias and evaluate risk in technology decisions, and shows how complete, top-down and bottom-up analyses can produce more consistent planning results. It suits students and practitioners of strategic management and IT planning who want a practical framework for matching technology with business goals and processes.