Alignment of information technology strategising practices and organisational goals

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dc.contributor.advisor Pretorius, Marius en
dc.contributor.postgraduate Naidu, Sudesh en
dc.date.accessioned 2015-11-25T09:47:27Z
dc.date.available 2015-11-25T09:47:27Z
dc.date.created 2015/09/01 en
dc.date.issued 2015 en
dc.description Thesis (PhD)--University of Pretoria, 2015. en
dc.description.abstract As the information age progresses, people and businesses alike have become accustomed to the convenience that technology brings into our lives. However, in the business world, high failure rates of projects to produce such technological systems have led to depleted profits and are an embarrassment to managers. These pressures have created a cultural gap between business and IT managers. It would benefit both business and IT managers to align the outputs of the IT function with the goals of the organisation and reduce this gap. However, the literature shows that, in the three to four decades that IT has been used in business, managers have been having difficulty in implementing the alignment of business and IT in practice. Therefore, the study began with the general purpose of determining why implementation of alignment is so difficult, and to develop a framework to guide practitioners towards successful implementation of alignment within their organisations. A review of the field of business and IT alignment was done which revealed a rich theory base and that the solution must lie in applying theory to the firm. The review also revealed a very well-established model in business-IT alignment theory; the Strategic Alignment Model (SAM). These findings shifted the main purpose of the study to focus the quest for a business and IT alignment solution to the context of the organisation. In particular, to determine the organisational attributes that could be used to provide a guiding framework for business and IT managers that could lead them to one of the four perspectives of the SAM most suited to their specific organisation. The academic importance of this study is the introduction of the three antecedents of alignment, namely, the role of the IT function, the mode of operation of the IT function and the sourcing option of the IT function. The methodology entails a web-based survey of a case organisation to establish the preconditions or antecedents of alignment. The study further shows how to extract viable focus areas to determine the goals of alignment and how to establish matters of timing between business and the IT function. It is hoped the framework developed, based on contextual information of the organisation, may fill the gap of applying alignment theory to practice. en
dc.description.availability Unrestricted en
dc.description.degree PhD en
dc.description.department Business Management en
dc.description.librarian tm2015 en
dc.identifier.citation Naidu, S 2015, Alignment of information technology strategising practices and organisational goals, PhD Thesis, University of Pretoria, Pretoria, viewed yymmdd <http://hdl.handle.net/2263/50729> en
dc.identifier.other S2015 en
dc.identifier.uri http://hdl.handle.net/2263/50729
dc.language.iso en en
dc.publisher University of Pretoria en_ZA
dc.rights © 2015 University of Pretoria. All rights reserved. The copyright in this work vests in the University of Pretoria. No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the University of Pretoria. en
dc.subject UCTD en
dc.subject.other SDG-09: Industry, innovation and infrastructure
dc.subject.other Economic and management sciences theses SDG-09
dc.title Alignment of information technology strategising practices and organisational goals en
dc.type Thesis en


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