A change management review: Extracting concepts to preserve business and it alignment

Abstract

Organisations introduce changes in order to adapt themselves to the extremely changing context. These changes often impact Information Technology (IT) and Business domains. In most of the cases, the scope of the organisational elements in these domains requiring adaptation is not well defined, leaving out elements, this can lead to misalignment. Thus, it is important to know the impact scope with the purpose of performing a full adaptation. When reviewing the literature in the Business-IT alignment research field, we found that there are no works providing support to deal with this aspect. However, there are several works in adjacent areas that have studied change management. In this paper, we report a systematic review of related work in these areas. From the review, we extract a set of clues applicable to the Business-IT alignment field what results in a change analysis framework and a set of rules to estimate impact scope and potential adaptation. Framework elements and rules are illustrated by means of a small example.