Return on Experience of the Implementation of a Business-IT alignment Approach: Theory and Practice

Islem Gmati (1) , Irina Rychkova (1) , Judith Barrios (2) , Selmin Nurcan (1)

1 CRI - Centre de Recherche en Informatique de Paris 1
2 ULA - Departamento de Computación [Univ de los Andes Venezuela]

Approaches for business-IT alignment assessment developed in the research community represent an increasing interest for practitioners as they offer an in-depth analysis of the business and IT systems in the organisations. In order to be used by practitioners as a regular tool, these approaches have to be validated. Our experience shows that the perception of validity in academia - "in vitro" - and in the industrial environment - "in vivo" - may differ substantially. In this paper, we discuss the theoretical and empirical (or practical) validity of alignment assessment approaches based on metrics. We propose an empirical validation of a fitness measurement approach for business-IT alignment. First we identify a set of practical validity criteria for this approach and then we generalise our example proposing a set of practical guidelines for operationalisation of approaches based on alignment measurements. Our study reveals a significant gap between our understanding of validity and the perception of our industrial partners about this validity. The contribution of this work is a set of empirical criteria of validity and a set of practical guidelines that can significantly improve the usability - by organisations - of research approaches for business-IT alignment assessment.

Mots clés: business-IT alignment; criteria of validity; measurements; theoretical validation; empirical validation

Domaines: Génie logiciel [cs.SE]

Islem Gmati, Irina Rychkova, Judith Barrios, Selmin Nurcan. Return on Experience of the Implementation of a Business-IT alignment Approach: Theory and Practice. 5th International Workshop on Business/IT Alignment and Interoperability, Jun 2010, France. pp.76-90. ⟨hal-00663008⟩