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Design of Situational Artefacts—Conceptual Foundations and Their Application to IT/Business Alignment

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Information Systems Development

Abstract

IT/business alignment is consistently rated as the #1 problem for CIOs of all kinds and sizes of companies. Although IS research has proposed a plethora of hypotheses and artefacts to explain and approach IT/business alignment problems, the large variety of goals and context factors seem to prevent effective solutions: Since companies face diverse challenges in achieving a high degree of IT/business alignment, a universal “one size fits all” approach seems not to be appropriate. IT/business alignment is therefore regarded as a class of relevant, important design problems that requires a situational solution approach. The conceptual foundations of situational problem analysis and artefact design are summarized, and a generic approach is proposed that transforms problem analysis into artefact design. The approach is then applied by decomposing the IT/business alignment problem into tangible qualities for business, IT systems, and IT governance. An explorative survey among 174 professionals is used to identify four clusters of IT/business alignment problems which each represent the current state according to certain qualities and also the priorities for future development. Using the proposed situational solution approach, four reference solutions are outlined.

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Acknowledgement

The IT/business alignment survey has been designed, conducted and interpreted together with Jan Saat, University of St. Gallen, as well as Ulrik Franke, Robert Lagerström and Mathias Ekstedt, all from KTH Stockholm.

The author wishes to thank Christian Fischer and Felix Wortmann, both University of St. Gallen, for fruitful discussions on constructional modelling methodology and for comments on this paper and its predecessor.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Information Management, University of St. Gallen, Müller-Friedberg-Strasse 8, 9000, St. Gallen, Switzerland

    Robert Winter

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  1. Robert Winter
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Correspondence to Robert Winter .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Fac. Mathematics & Physics, Dept. Software Engineering, Charles University Praha, Malostranske nam. 25, Praha 1, 118 00, Czech Republic

    Jaroslav Pokorny

  2. Dept. Information Technologies, Attn. Prof. Jiri Vorisek, Prague University of Economics, Nam. W. Churchilla 4, Praha, 130 67, Czech Republic

    Vaclav Repa

  3. Fac. Mathematics & Physics, Charles University, Praha, Malostranske nam. 25, Praha 1, 118 00, Czech Republic

    Karel Richta

  4. College of Business & Economics, Dept. Information Technology &, Boise State University, Univesity Dr. 1910, Boise, 83725-1615, Idaho, USA

    Wita Wojtkowski

  5. Fac. Information Technology, Monash University, Clayton, 3800, Victoria, Australia

    Henry Linger

  6. Dept. Accountancy & Finance, National University of Ireland, University Road, Galway, Ireland

    Chris Barry

  7. Dept. Accountancy & Finance, National University of Ireland, University Road, Galway, Ireland

    Michael Lang

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© 2011 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC

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Winter, R. (2011). Design of Situational Artefacts—Conceptual Foundations and Their Application to IT/Business Alignment. In: Pokorny, J., et al. Information Systems Development. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-9790-6_3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-9790-6_3

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, New York, NY

  • Print ISBN: 978-1-4419-9645-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-4419-9790-6

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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