RESUMO
The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has been forcing organizations to search for the provision of uninterrupted modes of operation for both their internal workers and external stakeholders. Basically, enterprises had to enter in an overextended state of organizational agility by swiftly revisiting their business strategies, offerings, and services;simultaneously, the time to assess the procurement of new IT solutions that could support their new state of doing business had to be reduced significantly. This continuous process to ascertain the long-term sustenance of the organization by means of matching the business with proper IT strategies and configurations is known as the Business IT Alignment (BITA). Despite the plethora of academic studies addressing the topic of BITA, to this day, the theoretical concocting of such studies makes it difficult for organizations to find a way to operationalize them. Additionally, the existence of many alignment evaluation frameworks seems to be countered by their offering of a series of complicated assessment procedures that are difficult to be implemented. Thereby, organizations are forced to create and use ad-hoc assessment methods for their BITA analysis. For this reason, we perform an exploratory case study negotiating the conduct of in-depth semi-structured interviews within three companies operating in Belgium, to investigate the need for an operationalized version of the alignment-measuring model, created by Luftman. The development of a methodology for an operationalized version of such a model could facilitate the swift determinization of the overall strategic alignment maturity level for every organization, regardless of their size, location, context or business domain. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022.
RESUMO
The strategic alignment tenets describe the generic processes/mechanisms for the Information Technology (IT) domain to be impactful to the ascertainment of business strategies within organizations. However, an in-depth reassessment of the level of integration between the organizational IT approach and the business convolutions needs to be performed in times of crisis such as the recent Covid-19 pandemic. For this reason, the present research aims to explore the impact of the pandemic on the state of strategic alignment maturity within the logistics sector. To this end, the Strategic Alignment Maturity Model (SAMM), composed by Luftman, was used to measure the pre-, and post-pandemic strategic alignment maturity levels in four production and distribution facilities in Belgium. This model was chosen due to its capacity to assign strategic alignment maturity scores in a wide spectrum of individual alignment dimensions. For the application of the SAMM, we performed semi-structured interviews to determine an overall strategic alignment maturity score for each company, for the stages before, and after the outset of the pandemic. Despite some fluctuations amongst the companies' alignment maturity trends between the two stages, our results suggest an aggregate increase in the average alignment maturity level for all the surveyed companies after the start of the pandemic. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.