Assessing the relationships among information technology flexibility, IT-business strategic alignment, and information technology effectiveness: An investigation of business intelligence implementation

Many researchers called for research on the relationship among IT-business strategic alignment (SA), IT flexibility (ITF), and IT effectiveness (ITE) to be extended to broader business environments in private and public sectors. The goal of this study was to fill the gap and address a limitation in previous scholarly research study (Ness, 2005) in the IT executive's perception of SA, ITF, and ITE via the implementation of business intelligence (BI) applications within the public school districts. The role of BI solution in business is becoming a focal point because BI can be considered as a business driven technologies that delivers the right information in the right way to the right people in the most effective way for effective strategic and operational business decisions. In pursuit of the optimal IT effectiveness, the study findings provided empirical evidence to support the study hypothesis that IT-business strategic alignment has a stronger positive correlation with school districts' IT effectiveness than IT flexibility; therefore, tighter IT-business strategic alignment and responsiveness were found critical and valuable for school districts' IT effectiveness and business productivity. The research findings depicted that ITF has no overall impact on ITE; but, ITE in school districts is ultimately decided based on their IT-business strategic alignment. In addition, it can be concluded that sufficient ITF could be considered as an enabler and a prerequisite component for an advanced maturity level of strategic alignment in school districts. Indeed, more research is needed to assess which construct(s) (ITF, SA, and/or ITFxSA) affect organizations' IT effectiveness and productivity. In a future study, the researcher recommends conducting a cross-industry (private and public sectors) comparison of these constructs via BI systems implementation and usage from both IT and business executives' perspective.