Research On The Alignment Of Information Technology Investment And Business Strategy

The issue,that enterprises conducting a huge amount of investment in IT have not received the expected return,has aroused widespread concern from academia and the business community.There are a lot of theories and methods on IT investment management,but the core of these theories is the theory of Strategy Alignment of Information Technology Investment and Business Strategy,which has become an important research topic in the field of enterprise informationization.Whether IT investments and.business strategy are alignment or not,is not only related to the expected returns from the huge IT investments,but also related to the achievement of core competitiveness and sustainable competitive advantages which based on the IT application.The alignment of information technology investment and business strategy has become the only way to achieve informationization successfully for enterprises.The research on the alignment of information technology investment and business strategy currently mainly focuses on the external environment of enterprises such as products and markets,especially on the direction of competitive strategy,the method of IT planning, and the contribution of strategy alignment to the enterprise performance.There are still many deficiencies in the researches of IT investments and business strategy alignment, such as the theoretical mechanisms,evaluation criteria,implementation method and system guarantee and so on,while these problems will just be the key factors to the realization of IT investments and business strategy alignment.In a word,the existing research results still could not provide appropriate and effective methods for the alignment of information technology investment and business strategy,which have been still puzzling the contemporary enterprise's information technology investment practice.Based on the SAM model of strategy alignment,this paper proposes the evaluation criteria and alignment degree of IT investments and business strategy alignment by analyzing the factors which influence the realization of strategy alignment,and then details the characteristics of the SAM model.After analyzing the internal relations of SAM model,it put forward the way to realize strategy alignment which based on the SAM model.This article evolves IT government theory,which is one of the theoretical foundations of strategy alignment,to the system guarantee of strategy alignment's implementation,and then,the paper analyzes the guarantee functions of COBIT model to strategy alignment.In the fourth part,this paper analyzes the technical methods of achieving strategic alignment,including BITA,EITA,and the strategy alignment's methods based on BPR and organizational structure.In the fifth part,the article provides a business case to illustrate the method and procedure of implementing strategy alignment.In the last part,a summary of this paper and a plan of further research will be given.