EARL'S INFORMATION SYSTEMS STRATEGY

Earl's Information Systems Strategy



Earl's Information Systems Strategy

Introduction

The sustained interest in strategic information systems alignment owes a great deal to research that continues to advance empirical evidence of its positive effects on IS and business success (Chan and Huff 1993; Sabherwal and Chan 2001). The notion of strategic alignment, as exposed in the literature, builds on three central arguments (Hirschheim and Sabherwal 2001). First, organizational performance depends on structures and capabilities that support the successful realization of strategic decisions; second, alignment is a two-way process, where business and IS strategies can act as mutual drivers; third, strategic IS alignment “is not an event but a process of continuous adaptation and change” (Henderson and Venkatraman 1993). While the former aspects are well rehearsed, it is still unclear how to achieve and sustain the process of strategic IS alignment over time. Our aim in this paper is to address this question by advancing the coevolutionary perspective as a new lens for theorizing about the dynamic, complex, and interdependent relationships between business and IS strategies. We believe that coevolutionary theory can shed insightful light on this process for two reasons. First, its central concern is to understand organizational adaptation and change by analyzing the simultaneous or coevolutionary development of organizations and their environments. Second, coevolutionary theory “will inform any research in organization studies, which spans levels of analyses and involves adaptation over time” (Lewin and Volberda 1999, p. 520).

In this quest, we respond to scholars who have been proposing “that the literature on IS alignment is beginning to mature and that future studies of alignment could benefit from…using established theories from IS or other disciplines” (Sabherwal and Chan 2001, p. 26). The paper is structured into four sections. We commence with a cursory review of strategic IS alignment theory, tracing its historical development, summarizing contemporary alignment thinking, and eliciting its conceptual and practical constraints. We continue with a brief overview of coevolutionary theory and highlight its use in organization science. On presenting our first take in applying coevolutionary theory to the process of adaptation and change between business and IS strategies, we conclude the manuscript by indicating the implications of coevolutionary theory for empirical IS strategy research.

Literature Review

Strategic IS Alignment

Strategic alignment is based on the premise that the inability to realize value from IS investment is, in part, due to the lack of alignment between the business and IS strategies of the organization (Henderson and Venkatraman 1993). Since the late 1970s, a substantial body of work has been evolving that explores both theory and practice in this domain. In this section, we briefly trace the historical development of this thinking, following the structure outlined in Figure 1.

Ever since the use of IS in organizations moved beyond automation and began seeking competitive advantage, there has been a considerable interest in developing more strategically oriented approaches to determine IS investments. Early approaches devised top-down strategic planning models “based on the assumption that an IS strategy can be planned and is ...