Making the information technology-business alignment works: a framework of IT-based competitive strategy

Seamless IT-business integration enables superior performance and provides value creation opportunities for an enterprise to achieve a sustainable competitive advantage. Yet, creating IT-business alignment remains a challenge. Some users consider the existing IT-business alignment methodologies too complicated for practical implementation. This paper proposes a simplified and practical framework, an IT-based competitive strategy framework, to align an IT strategy with enterprise businesses based on a design science research methodology. The framework consists of three elements to formulate a comprehensive IT-based strategy, i.e., value drivers of IT implementation, competitive factors and an IT competitive strategy. The framework evaluation includes interviewing experts and practitioners, applying the proposed framework in an Indonesian enterprise and assessing the framework benefits on a qualitative basis. The observational evaluation with the experts concludes that the proposed framework is helpful for the targeted users. The framework application in a company also demonstrates the advantage and the usefulness of the proposed framework.