Strategic Alignment In Business Strategy

Introduction

The aim for this review is to create an interpretation of how a business using an information system which is aligned with their business strategy can create a competitive advantage against its competitors as well as achieving goals along the way. Before alignment can be fully understood the meaning of information systems and business strategies should be fully understood.

Information systems are defined as a group of elements organized with the purpose of supporting operational decision makings and supporting the managements decisions once they are made to contribute to productivity efficiency and the customers satisfaction. It is used to help achieve success in various areas such as finance, operations and marketing (Bagad,2009).

It consists of the competencies, businesses scope and the company’s governance. These all focus the type of business that the company is engaged in (Chan et al., 1997).

Organisation infrastructure

The bottom left domain is the organisational infrastructure. This consists of skills, processes and administrative infrastructure. The administrative structure consists of the structure of the company and the responsibilities of the workers (Van Der Wetering et al.,2017). The businesses skills refer to the human resources. Specifically, how the employees are trained and what experience they have. And the business processes are what drives the business, and which determines the work flow which can be integrated with the use of Information technology (Delone & McLean,

(Henderson & Venkatraman, 1993) made the argument that an IT system on its own could not compete with other companies never mind create a competitive advantage, the advantage comes with it is aligned correctly with proper business goals. If the goals cannot be completed it is most likely down to the fact that the business is not properly aligned. (Gartlan and Graeme,2007).

Factors that promote alignment between Business and IT Strategy

For a business to successfully align their business strategy and their information systems they must identify factors to promote their alignment. These factors are;

Long term focus

Both the IT strategy as well as the business strategy, they should both have long term focus and the business should prevail with the strategy even if it does not seem to work (Tallon, 2007). A lack of focus could lead to the alignment to fail (Chan & Sabherwal,2001).

Organisational structure

The organisational structure helps to provide a mechanism for the ownership of strategic formulation which helps the company to align (Tallon, 2007). This strategy is put in place to ensure it strategy but also to have someone to hold accountable if the alignment is not a success.