Toward CNO characteristics to support Business/IT-Alignment

Abstract

Increasing market dynamics rapidly change the business landscape. Collaboration amongst organizations is a common way to cope with these dynamics. Achieving a state of Business/IT-alignment (BITA) within Collaborative Networked Organizations (CNOs) appears to be a valuable endeavor. Therefore, this paper investigates CNO characteristics, as a basis, to incrementally design BITA artifacts that facilitate CNO-dynamism. Via a structured literature review and an expert session, we synthesized a list of 6 main and 22 sub-characteristics for CNOs. This list provides more detailed characteristics than we found in the literature. We also discuss the importance of the characteristic “Dynamic and self-regulating network” and the need for new BITA models that can cope with the dynamics.