Kari Hiekkanen

Aligning Alignment with Strategic Context: A Literature Review

The alignment of business and IT has been a persistent topic of discussion in the past decades. As information systems have evolved from an administrative support function to an integral part of business fabric, the classic “internal” perspective adopted by the bulk of alignment research falls short in accounting for the dynamic business network context and continuous evolution with the environment. The information systems planning and strategy discourse should transcend the notion of “alignment” and bring out the strategy-shaping role of IT. This paper presents a classification of business–IT alignment approaches vis-a-vis respective schools of thought in strategic management. Both disciplines are seen to co-evolve with the increasingly complex “strategic context”. The approach is meant to help contextualize extant and future work in terms of underlying assumptions and thereby make more conscious statements about the practical applicability of research topics, methods and results in varying contexts. As relatively simple, static and mechanistic conceptualizations of strategy and business-IT alignment render inadequate, concepts such as dynamic capabilities, co-evolution and organizational ambidexterity represent a more adaptive and more encompassing approach to make sense of the increasingly complex strategic context.

Architects' Perceptions on EA Use -- An Empirical Study

Enterprise Architecture (EA) is increasingly being utilized by organizations as an approach to manage the complexity of business processes, information systems and technical infrastructure. Although EA is generally regarded as an effective management tool, its full benefits can be realized only when it is incorporated into day-to-day operations of the organization. In the Finnish public sector, the use of EA has recently been mandated by the newly passed Act on Information Management Governance in Public Administration. The aim of the legislation is to achieve more efficient, integrated and cost-efficient public services. This article describes the results of a survey aimed to identify perceptions on actual EA work among Finnish public sector participants currently undertaking EA initiatives. The results highlight potential issues related to successful EA adoption.

Comparing Information Models in XML-based e-Business Standards -- A Quantitative Analysis

Standardization is an important aspect of building interoperable service-oriented e-Business solutions. XML-based standards have become increasingly popular to address some of the interoperability challenges, both in commercial and governmental organizations. However, the number of available XML-based standards has created a situation, where users have difficulties in choosing the most suitable standard, or are forced to support multiple standards at the same time. Therefore, it is important to provide tools for analyzing and comparing different standards. Existing qualitative studies have created tools that can highlight general features by manual analysis. However, in this paper, we argue that additional insights could be obtained by extracting relevant quantitative metrics of the actual XML Schema documents that the standards contain. This study analyzes three prominent e-Business document standards in terms of their quantitative metrics. Based on our results we claim that quantitative studies can enhance the use of the qualitative analysis frameworks and bring attention to useful details when comparing different standards.

Service-oriented business to business integration: A systematic literature analysis

Business automation continues to be a strategic target for IT investment. However, business automation involves inherent challenges, such as system integration issues. Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) and business-to-business (B2B) integration standards are two approaches used for creating business automation solutions. In this paper a systematic literature analysis is conducted to explore the integration concepts in these two approaches. The objective of the study is to characterize the integration issues in these approaches, and to synthesize the findings into characteristics of so called service-oriented B2B integration. From the literature it is concluded that the SOA approach emphasizes support for dynamic business processes within an enterprise, while the B2B standards approach focuses on pre-defined semantic descriptions of business data that is exchanged between business partners. Thus, a service-oriented B2B integration environment is conceptualized where the B2B standards are used to strengthen the semantic interoperability, while dynamic business process implementations are enabled through the SOA approach.

The Impact of IT Governance Practices on Strategic Alignment

The importance of strategic alignment has been recognized both by academia and practitioners alike. Previous research provides an ample body of work both on IT governance and strategic alignment. However, empirical evidence of the effect of IT governance on alignment is still lacking. This study explores how IT governance impacts strategic alignment on strategic and tactical levels. Based on a survey, the study confirms a positive impact of IT governance on strategic alignment and proposes a preliminary set of eight key practices of IT governance to support strategic alignment with further scrutiny of different industries, regions, and larger sample sizes.

Improving Strategic Alignment: A Case Study

This study aims at providing organizations with new insight on how IT governance practices impact strategic alignment. The research is conducted as an in-depth case study in a large, multinational manufacturing and service company. The case reveals that improving IT governance practices is not sufficient to achieve high alignment, when the understanding of strategic value of IT is lacking. Improved alignment would require that IT is perceived as a strategic function in the organization and the IT governance treated accordingly. Bringing business and IT socially and culturally closer to each other is also required, but improving alignment on the social and cultural dimensions is dependent on the existence of the strategic direction: achieving alignment is difficult without common objectives between business and IT people. In general, the study illustrates limited impact of IT governance practices on alignment without requisite strategic direction.