Why is aligning economic- and IT services so difficult?

Abstract

Since its inception, Service Orientation has promised to offer seamless alignment of the business and IT aspects of service-oriented systems. Practitioners, however, often report that such alignment is far from being solved. Specifically, current research in aligning services either remains at a too abstract, strategic level, or is too technology-oriented to be really useful in practice. In spite of being an "old" problem, business-IT alignment is still a dilemma. What makes alignment so difficult? In this work we address this fundamental question by questioning what should be aligned, and what are the concerns hindering alignment. This paper explores the conceptual gaps around the notion of service in the two economic- and IT perspectives. By framing the core constructs of Service Orientation and contrasting those constructs between the economicand IT perspectives, this paper elicits five core alignment concerns. We illustrate the concerns using a real-life case study featuring an airport baggage handling system. The alignment concerns pinpoint promising solutions in which the alignment problem can be solved. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014.