Thesis (MBA)--Stellenbosch University, 2013. / ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Research into Business and IT alignment and the critical success factors is quite vast and diverse.
Many studies have been carried out on specific industries and companies of a certain size. Other
studies have dissected strategic IT alignment into different dimensions, intellectual and social. Yet
other studies have taken different approaches, such as process-oriented, cognitive approaches,
and resource-based approaches. All these were done in the quest to find the factors that influence
the attainment of strategic alignment in organisations. There has, however, not been a study that
sought to bring all these different factors together and provide one collective view on them, which
this study seeks to do.
There also have been some studies on how to measure alignment. Several different approaches
were made in an effort to discern the way in which alignment can be measured and what criteria
should be used. These efforts have been varied and no particular study has tried to bring them all
together to assist practitioners in their attempts to determine the level of alignment in
organisations.
The purpose of this literature review is to collect all the different critical success factors as well as
all the common success measures, and formulate a collated list for both. This research report
seeks to give an integrated view of the factors required to bring about alignment as well as the
measures practitioners–use to determine the level of alignment once these factors are in place.
The findings show that there are commonalities among the factors that influence alignment. These
have been tabulated into one list, bringing together all common factors from the pertinent literature
to date. They were grouped into seven main categories based on similarity, which are shared
knowledge, planning processes, executive commitment, communication, clarity of business goals,
prior success of IT, and user involvement. These common factors are presented in Table 4.1.
The measures for success are more varied and a separate list for the common success measures
was also tabulated. The common measures of alignment had a total of 15 criteria, which are shown
in Table 4.1.These lists can be used by the practitioner who needs guidance on which factors are
important for the realisation of strategic alignment and which criteria to measure once the factors
have been implemented.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:netd.ac.za/oai:union.ndltd.org:sun/oai:scholar.sun.ac.za:10019.1/95625 |
| Date | 03 1900 |
| Creators | Chimbuya, Andrew Toendepi |
| Contributors | Butler, Martin, Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Economic and Management Sciences. Graduate School of Business. |
| Publisher | Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University |
| Source Sets | South African National ETD Portal |
| Language | en_ZA |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | xii, 110 p. |
| Rights | Stellenbosch University |
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