Week 4 (Lecture 4) - The Strategic Alignment Model

Week 4 (Lecture 4) - The Strategic Alignment Model  

Source / Reference:

1.          J. C. Henderson and N. Venkatraman, "Strategic alignment: Leveraging information technology for transforming organizations" 

2.          N. Venkatraman, IT-Enabled Business Transformation: From Automation to Business Scope Redefinition

3.          Omar A.EI Sawy, Redesigning Enterprise Processes for e-Business

Subject: 
In Lecture 4 - Which alignment strategy in SAM model is the best? and why?

Response:

After reading the articles and lecture notes, I believe that there is no best alignment perspective. In other words, any alignment perspective can be the best under different situations.

The information I found on the internet that pointing out the four dominant alignment perspectives can be separated in different characteristic. Strategy Execution and Technology transformation focus on operations strategy; Competitive Potential and Service Level focus on using IT strategy to improve or modify the current operations strategy.

In the following, I would like to give an example to show the understanding. Now, XXX company want to have some impact of the new product or service and this company can use any alignment (we focus on Competitive Potential here). In Competitive Potential, the top manager need to have the IT and business knowledge to analyze the problem and solution. Firstly, he/she should has abilities using business knowledge to analyze IT strategy or technologic to improve the current business governance and operational strategy. Also, IS/IT manager is the role of analyst to identify the IT market environment and using IT knowledge to discover the threat of the company. In this way, XXX company can be completely to analyze and safety to impact the new products and services.

Can XXX company use Strategy Execution? Sure, but it may not better than Competitive Potential. The reason is that Strategy Execution lack a complete analysis on IT, it may also increase the threat.

On the other hand,  if a company want to develop an IT system to increase the business  operation, Competitive Potential is not suitable. We need to use Service Level.

We can see that if we use different alignment in different situation will have a different result. So, there is no best alignment perspective, but no denying, IT/IS is a important key in a business.