An inventory of the business and IT alignment research field

Abstract

The area of business and IT alignment (BITA) has received increased attention during the last decade. As a consequence of this the amount of literature has also been growing increasingly. Since the interest for the field has grown it has also become important to follow and monitor trends and dominant directions of ongoing research within the field. The purpose of this paper is therefore to make an inventory of areas and directions that have attracted our attention in the literature. As a result of such inventory we present a set of categories that shows the focus and diversification of the BITA field. In the findings we can observe that the area of the highest research interest is development of a new instrumental support (methods, frameworks, approaches, etc.) for BITA. One dimension that seems to be partly neglected in the literature is procedural guidance about HOW to conduct and achieve business and IT alignment. The existing instrumental support that are presented in the literature has a strong focus on WHAT to do and WHAT to deal with (regarding both theoretical and practical issues concerning BITA), but they are missing the HOW dimension to a large extent. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.