The Influence of Organizational Politics on Business-IT Alignment

Business-IT alignment continues to remain a top management concern. Regardless of ample research, achieving and sustaining business-IT alignment remains challenging to organization's management. To this day, the influence of organizational politics remains unstudied in the light of business-IT alignment. By performing a case study in a large organization in Sweden, the authors present and discuss how organizational politics influences business-IT alignment from the viewpoint of practitioners. They find that organizational politics has a negative influence on communications, partnering, IT governance, IT scope, and business and IT skills of the Strategic Alignment Maturity model. Furthermore, the authors identified several root causes for organizational politics in the business-IT alignment context, not addressed by the commonly used business-IT alignment constructs. The findings of this research study are useful to business and IT practitioners for achieving and sustaining business-IT alignment in their organizations considering the influence of organizational politics.