Exploring the Complex Relationship Between Alignment and Company's Performances

Abstract

The enduring interest of scientific and practice oriented literature in the alignment between business and IT is based on the supposed impact that alignment exerts on company's performances. The topic has been repeatedly addressed in the literature, generating different and sometimes conflicting results. In our study we adopt a process oriented conceptualization of alignment and a complexity science view of a company to investigate the relationship between the alignment process and company's performances. The study is conducted through a multi-case study methodology that involved four companies implementing alignment processes. We found that corporate performances are influenced by the type of complexity, structural and dynamic, enabled by the alignment process and that two constructs, infrastructure sophistication and business agility, determine the type of complexity. The contribution of the paper is both theoretical, as it extends previous alignment literature exploiting a complexity science perspective, and for practice, as it contributes to unravel the relationship between alignment and performances providing suggestions on how to improve the efficacy of the alignment process.