Assessing strategic, tactical and operational alignment factors for SMEs: Alignment across the organisation's value chain

Abstract

The strategic use of Information Technology (IT), better known as strategic alignment, has significantly increased, as a result of the strong dependence of organisational activity on Information Systems (IS) and their related technologies. Strategic alignment is considered as a key element to improve performance on organisations, enhance efficiency and allow organisations to be more competitive in their respective industry. One of the first steps towards achieving strategic alignment is to have adequate means to measure it. Current alignment assessment approaches, though, are mainly focused at the strategic level but provide little insight at tactical and operational levels, which are recognized as important areas for achieving strategic alignment. Furthermore, most of the existing approaches are tested in large organisations and there is little research on assessing the effectiveness of these approaches for Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs). This paper proposes an alternative instrument that aims to the understanding of IT alignment at all three levels: strategic, tactical and operational. Finally this paper presents the findings of applying this instrument on a SME. The results demonstrate the feasibility of use the proposed instrument when determining the level of maturity. The instrument proved to be useful to share, between all the participants at all levels, the basic knowledge that is needed to achieve alignment, recognising the mature factors that contribute to the organisation’s alignment and also to highlight other less matured factors that need to be improved to leverage the alignment maturity.