Basics for Improving Business and IT Alignment : Managing innovations in IT/Business solutions

The alignment of Business and IT has been well known,well documented and discussed since the late 1970´s. There aremany reasons why the alignment gap still exists and is becomingmore and more crucial. Luftman has proposed a tool tomeasure the alignment, called Strategic Alignment MaturityAssessment. His method is mainly a diagnostic tool to identify,compare and discuss the current state of business and ITalignment in an organization. We discuss how organizationscan improve the business and IT alignment starting with necessaryimprovement of the information technology part. The discussionis based on general findings about innovation, sociotechnicalsystems and soft systems perspectives. Some of thesefindings have been applied and compared with evolution ofbusiness and IT alignment at Sandvik Tooling, a global Swedishcompany. The major results show how a company can gethigh business value from IT by managing IT as an innovationcapability. We have summarized our findings in an Innovationbased Method for IT/Business Solutions.I