It is widely acknowledged that information technology (IT) and business resources need to be well aligned to achieve organizational goals. Yet, year after year, chief information officers still name business-IT alignment a key challenge for IT executives. While alignment research has matured, we still lack a sound theoretical foundation for alignment. Transcending the predominantly strategic executive-level focus, we develop a model of "operational alignment" and IT business value that combines a social perspective of IT and business linkage with a view of interaction between business and IT at nonstrategic levels, such as in daily business operations involving regular staff. Drawing on social capital theory to explain how alignment affects organizational performance, we examine why common suggestions such as "communicate more" are insufficient to strengthen alignment and disclose how social capital between IT and business units drives alignment and ultimately IT business value. Empirical data from 136 firms confirms the profound impact of operational business-IT alignment, composed of social capital and business understanding of IT, on IT flexibility, IT utilization, and organizational performance. The results show that social capital theory is a useful theoretical foundation for understanding how business IT alignment works. The findings suggest that operational alignment is at least as important as strategic alignment for IT service quality; that managers need to focus on operational aspects of alignment beyond communication by fostering knowledge, trust, and respect; and that IT utilization and flexibility are appropriate intermediate goals for business-IT alignment governance.
This paper is motivated by the following question: What drives the diffusion of a communication standard and what results can we expect? Past literature provides many instructive but mostly unrelated answers. Frequent findings are startup problems, penguin effects, and tendencies toward monopoly. But substantial problems in applying the models to concrete standardization problems reveal that the dynamics are probably more complex. Not all networks are ultimately conquered by a single standard once it has attracted a certain number of users. And not all diffusion results are either complete or no standardization. We address the question of the conditions of particular diffusion behaviors by developing a formal standardization model that captures all fragmented phenomena in a unified approach. Drawing from findings of other research, we incorporate the structure of the underlying user network as an important determinant for diffusion behaviors. The approach allows us to disclose varying conditions that generate frequently observed standardization behaviors as special parameter constellations of the model. Using equilibrium analysis and computer simulations we identify a standardization gap that reveals the magnitude of available standardization gains for individuals and the network as a whole. The analysis shows that network topology and density have a strong impact on standard diffusion and that the renowned tendency toward monopoly is far less common. We also report how the model can be used to solve corporate standardization problems.