Strategic Alignment in Washington State Organizations Between IT and Business Leaders

Strategic alignment with IT governance provides a way to govern and monitor risks within the IT department or organization. Governance of IT involves directing the use of IT resources to support the organization’s strategic business objectives. As defined in ISO/IEC 38500, senior business leader’s governance of IT drives the IT management framework, requiring the top-down focus on producing value through effective use of IT and an approach to governance of IT that engages business leader’s inappropriate behavior (Juiz, & Toomey, 2015). The specific problem is the gap of strategic alignment between senior business leaders and the IT governance steering committee (Gerow, 2018). The purpose of this study is to research the causes of the lack of strategic alignment between senior business leaders and IT governance steering committee through case studies and interviews and provide suggestions for remediation. The purpose of this qualitative case study is to focus on the strategic alignment barriers between senior business leaders and IT governance steering committee and how it affects the performance of the organization. Three Washington State organizations and approximately fifteen interviewees will be involved in the study. The research data and the interviewee’s responses about strategic alignment between senior business leaders and the IT governance steering committee supported five themes beyond those initially created with business and IT. The identified themes were communication barriers, performance, strategic alignment, skillset barriers, and social barriers. Based on the findings and implication from this study, most of the challenges affecting Washington State organizations between IT steering committees and senior business leaders was a lack of strategic alignment. To rectify this problem in practice, the IT steering committee and senior business leaders need to focus on methods for improving strategic alignment as critical to organizational success