Antecedents of IT-Business Strategic Alignment and the Moderating Roles of Goal Commitment and Environmental Uncertainty

Aligning information technology (lT) strategy with business strategy has been one
of the top concerns of practitioners and scholars. Despite the documented positive effects
of strategic alignment on organizational success, only few organizations consider
themselves in alignment. Although numerous studies exist about IT-business alignment,
the empirical studies based on strong theories have been rare in the alignment literature.
This dissertation attempts to fulfill this gap by proposing and empirically validating a
comprehensive strategic alignment model. Drawing on prior literature, we identified five
antecedents of alignment; centralization, formalization , shared domain knowledge,
successful IT history and relationship management. We further hypothesized that the
effects of these antecedents are mediated by the drivers of alignment, which are conceptualized as the level of connection of lT and business planning and the level of
communication between IT and business managers. Furthermore, the proposed research
model investigated the moderating effects of goal commitment of business executives to
achieving and sustaining strategic alignment and environmental uncertainty. The results
showed that both drivers had significant effects on alignment, and the effect of
connection is about twice that of communications. Our findings also support for the
effects of all antecedents except centralization. Finally, we found partial support for the
effects of moderating variables. Overall, the main contribution of this dissertation is the
development and empirical validation of a comprehensive strategic alignment model with
considerations for antecedents and potential moderating effects, thus extending the
alignment literature by differentiating the effects of dimensions of environmental
uncertainty as well as introducing the goal commitment and IT unit structure constructs,
and providing prescriptive insight for managing IT-business strategic alignment.