Strategic IT Alignment: A Model for Competitive Advantage

This study examines how and why strategic IT alignment can be used to create competitive advantage and to what extent information intensity affects this process. A model is tested to examine how and why strategic IT alignment can produce enhanced organizational knowledge that yields competitive advantage. The model differentiates between alignment between the business plan and IT plan (BP-ITP alignment) and alignment between the IT plan and business plan (ITP-BP alignment). Results support six of the eight hypotheses and conclude that information intensity is an important antecedent to strategic IT alignment, that strategic IT alignment is best explained by multiple constructs which operationalize both process and content measures, and that ITP-BP, but not BP-ITP, alignment is significantly related to the use of IT for competitive advantage