The organisational factors that influence the alignment or misalignment between IT services strategy and corporate strategy

Mohamed AbdelMoneim
Identify and explore the organisational factors
that influence the alignment or misalignment
between IT services strategy and corporate
strategy
University of Liverpool
Dissertation
Mohamed AbdelMoneim
2015

Mohamed AbdelMoneim
Identify and explore the organisational factors that influence the
alignment or misalignment between IT services strategy and corporate
strategy
University of Liverpool
Dissertation
Dissertation Advisor: Robin MacDonald
Student: Mohamed AbdelMoneim
Student ID: H00032445
2015

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ACKNOWLEDGMENT
Thanks very much Dr. Robin MacDonald for his tremendous effort and help; without his
instruction, this dissertation would haven’t been in such comprehensiveness. Thanks a lot my
family, specially my parents, who supported me during the entire MBA programme.

ABSTRACT
Today, IT is no longer a collection of tools developed by programmers to deliver some
technical functions. However, IT became a strategic business enabler that drives today’s
organisations towards success. In other words, IT differentiates organisations and helps substation
competitive advantages. Hence, IT services & business strategies alignment is the key point that
organisations should implement to be agile, dynamic and innovative. In addition, IT shouldn’t be
considered as some technical tools that enable technical deliverables, however, IT is about
realising values and solutions that position organisations in today’s fierce competitions by
achieving the business strategic initiatives. In this very dissertation, the author addressed the
organisational factors that influence the alignment and/or misalignment between IT services and
business strategies. Put it another way, when IT services deliverables weren’t alignment with the
overall business strategic outcomes then IT services fail to realise the required value the business
planned for and IT investments will be see as overhead then questioned. The author, however,
investigated what are those factors that influence the alignment and/or misalignment, how those
factors influence the alignment and/or misalignment, how organisations can manage those factors
to mitigate the misalignment and achieve quality alignment, and finally the author provided some
recommendations on how those factors can be managed, optimised and controlled. The author
adopted a quantitative research methodology to conduct his research and investigation
crystallised by a list of questions published online to several industries and participants in form of
a digital questionnaire. The author found that there are 16 organisational factors that influence
the alignment between IT services and business strategies, and overlooking them leads to
misaligning IT services and business strategies, and potentially affects the business performance.
In return, the author presented a framework that integrates, manages and implements those
factors to help today’s organisations mitigate the risk of misaligning IT services and business
strategies and the author suggested a modern toolset that realise that framework so today’s
organisation can implement that framework.

TABLE OF CONTENTS
1. Chapter One: Introduction......................................................................................................................................... 8
1.1 Background ......................................................................................................................................................... 8
1.2 Context of the Problem....................................................................................................................................... 8
1.3 Statement of the Problem .................................................................................................................................. 9
1.4 Aims & Objectives............................................................................................................................................. 10
1.5 Significance of the Research ............................................................................................................................. 12
1.6 Research Overview ........................................................................................................................................... 12
1.7 Motivations behind the Research..................................................................................................................... 12
1.8 Chapter by Chapter........................................................................................................................................... 13
2. Chapter 2: Literature Review................................................................................................................................... 15
2.1 Introduction ...................................................................................................................................................... 15
2.2 Literatures Analysis........................................................................................................................................... 15
2.3 Summary........................................................................................................................................................... 24
3. Chapter 3: Research Methodologies........................................................................................................................ 27
3.1 Introduction ...................................................................................................................................................... 27
3.2 Management Research Methodologies............................................................................................................ 27
3.3 Research Methodology..................................................................................................................................... 28
3.4 Tools & Techniques........................................................................................................................................... 28
3.5 The Researcher Roles........................................................................................................................................ 29
3.6 Questionnaire Design........................................................................................................................................ 30
3.7 Participants & Industries................................................................................................................................... 34
3.8 Trustworthiness ................................................................................................................................................ 35
3.9 Data Analysis..................................................................................................................................................... 35
3.10 Summary ........................................................................................................................................................ 36
4. Chapter 4: Results & Analysis................................................................................................................................... 37
4.1 Introduction ...................................................................................................................................................... 37
4.2 Data Outlook..................................................................................................................................................... 37
4.3 Data Analytics ................................................................................................................................................... 44
4.4 Summary........................................................................................................................................................... 48
5. Chapter 5: Conclusion & Recommendation............................................................................................................. 49
5.1 Introduction ...................................................................................................................................................... 49
5.2 Conclusion......................................................................................................................................................... 49
5.3 Recommendation.............................................................................................................................................. 52
5.4 Summary........................................................................................................................................................... 54
6. References ............................................................................................................................................................... 56
7. Appendix A............................................................................................................................................................... 61
7.1 Introduction ...................................................................................................................................................... 61
7.2 Questionnaire Questions List............................................................................................................................ 61
8. Appendix B............................................................................................................................................................... 68

LIST OF FIGURES
Figure 2.2-1 Enterprise engineering and its architecture (Cuenca et al., 2011)...............................................................16
Figure 2.2-2 IT Strategy Components (Cuenca et al., 2011) .............................................................................................17
Figure 2.2-3 Portfolio Management Process (Long, 2012) ...............................................................................................17
Figure 2.2-4 Governance and Management bodies: Roles & responsibilities (Lainhart et al., 2012)...............................18
Figure 2.2-5 The 7 phases of implementation life cycle (Lainhart et al., 2012)................................................................19
Figure 2.2-6 ITIL Strategic Alignment Model (Kashanchi & Toland, 2006) .......................................................................20
Figure 2.2-7 Key Roles, Responsibilities and Relationships (Lainhart et al., 2012)...........................................................21
Figure 2.2-8 Enterprise Architecture – Modelling (Martin et al., 2009) ...........................................................................22
Figure 2.2-9 Goals Cascade (Lainhart, 2012) .................................................................................................................... 22
Figure 2.2-10 Business-IT Alignment (Trienkens et al., 2014)...........................................................................................23
Figure 2.3-1 Holistic Enterprise Alignment (Trienekens et al., 2014) ...............................................................................26
Figure 3.6-1 Questionnaire Core Factors (The Author, 2015) ..........................................................................................32
Figure 3.6-2 Meta-Architecture Design process (The Author, 2015)................................................................................33
Figure 3.10-1 Chapter 3 Elements (The Author, 2015).....................................................................................................36
Figure 4.2-1 Number of Employees (The Author, 2015)...................................................................................................37
Figure 4.2-2 Industries & Sectors (The Author, 2015) ......................................................................................................38
Figure 4.2-3 Process Maturity Levels (The Author, 2015) ................................................................................................39
Figure 4.2-4 Challenges in Creating Value of IT (The Author, 2015).................................................................................39
Figure 4.2-5 ISO/IEC Standards (The Author, 2015) ......................................................................................................... 40
Figure 4.2-6 Organisational Cultures (The Author, 2015).................................................................................................41
Figure 4.2-7 Financial Evaluation Tools (The Author, 2015).............................................................................................42
Figure 5.3-1 An Integrated Framework (The Author, 2015).............................................................................................52
Figure 5.3-2 Integration between different frameworks (Lainhart et al., 2012) ..............................................................54
Figure 5.4-1 ITIL & TOGAF Integration (Ermers et al., 2009) ............................................................................................55
Figure 7.2-1 Processes for Managemed of Enterprise IT (Lainhart et al., 2012) ..............................................................68
LIST OF TABLES
Table 1.4-1 Factors Matrix (The Author, 2015) ................................................................................................................ 11
Table 1.4-2 Factor Implications Matrix (The Author, 2015)..............................................................................................11
Table 3.2-1 Qualitative & Quantitative analysis (Bernard, 2011).....................................................................................28
Table 4.2-1 ITIL Service Strategy Processes (The Author, 2015).......................................................................................43
Table 4.2-2 ITIL Service Design Processes (The Author, 2015) .........................................................................................43
Table 4.2-3 ITIL Service Transition Processes (The Author, 2015)....................................................................................43
Table 4.2-4 ITIL Service Operations Processes (The Author, 2015) ..................................................................................43
Table 4.2-5 Service Operations Functions (The Author, 2015).........................................................................................43
Table 4.3-1 Summary of How Factors Align / Misalign IT services and business strategies (The Author, 2015)..............46
Table 4.3-2 Proposed Controls & Recommendations (The Author, 2015) .......................................................................47

Chapter 1: Introduction
Mohamed AbdelMoneim – University of Liverpool - 2015 8
1. Chapter One: Introduction
1.1 Background
The technology proved its vital role in any business model, for example, using the email
services and web-based applications was seen as the foundation of any business infrastructure. In
addition, the significant development and improvement that mobile phones embraced recently
introduced a new generation of smartphones, which were capable of utilising any sort of
technologies. For instance, money transfer and banking services don’t demand any physical
interaction with the bank agent. In addition, technology enabled many organisations to establish
worldwide operations, for example, cloud services and globalised operations centres blurred the
physical boundaries between continents and approached a diverse number of customers. Hence,
managing the technology within any business is no longer a trivial process, however, losing control
over technology and poorly managing it would certainly introduce pitfalls and setbacks.
The term technology is quite generic since it does contain several categories and practices; for
example, the microprocessors and communications industries are tightly coupled with different
kind of technologies that matter only in certain sectors. However, information technology (IT)
became the enabler that determines organisations performance and capabilities (Ho-Chang et al.,
2014). In light of the revolutionary development of services the originations offer to their
customers across the world, it is significantly important to adopt and implement very
sophisticated solutions that enable the organisations promoting the marketing practice to
confront the fierce competitions and introduce innovative services. Therefore, information
technology (IT) solutions brought a lot of new capabilities such as business intelligence, data
analytics and marketing intelligence that realised only when IT solutions are aligned with the
business strategies (Albescu & Pugna, 2014).
1.2 Context of the Problem
It is quite interesting to highlight and emphasise on the fact that IT solutions should realise
values to the business once implemented and deployed. Each business describes the value-added
in different terminologies and critical success factors (CSFs). However, the ultimate value-added to
any kind of business is the customer satisfaction since without that the business would straggle to
generate wealth to its stakeholders and eventually would run of customers (Setia et al., 2013). In
other words, IT solutions and services offer a diverse number of capabilities, however, adopting
those capabilities and services should address the business vision, goals, objectives and tactics in a
very cost-effective approach. IT solutions and services realise a significant number of values and
opportunities, however, the cost of IT should be aligned with the overall business budgets and
investment plans in order to achieve a win-win scenario where mutual benefits to customers and
business are realised (Jafari, 2014).
Furthermore, IT services became more strategically important to today’s business since they
enable the organisations to achieve competitive advantages in many different ways (Clemons &
Weber, 1990). Also IT services utilise the organisational resources in order to create new business
opportunities and support the operational activities (Clemons & Weber, 1990). Therefore, if IT
services and solutions fail to utilise organisations resources, create new opportunities and achieve
competitive advantages then the IT services and solutions will impede the organisations from any
further growth. Ultimately, this would risk the organisations performance and their market shares,

and introduce an unacceptable increase in the operational expense (OPEX), which will initiate the
‘fire fighting’ processes in order to reduce and control the OPEX. Consequently, that scenario
would lead to blocking any investments in the capital expenditure (CAPEX), customer satisfaction
programmes, business agility frameworks and quality of service improvements.
1.3 Statement of the Problem
Therefore, it’s worth mentioning that IT practice is no longer a function that today’s
organisations utilise to achieve the business visions and goals, however, IT services became a
strategic partner that enable the business to achieve operations efficiency and effective outcomes
(Drnevich & Croson, 2013). In other words, the strategic planning of IT investments and projects
should be implemented and considered as any business critical strategic planning disciplines
(Clemons & Weber, 1990). Although IT services capitalise on realising the strategic business
objectives and sound performance but there is a significant risk that IT solutions and services
aren’t aligned with the strategic business objectives (Otim et al., 2012). The misalignment
between IT solutions and business objectives and strategies could affect the business negatively,
for example, unjustified investments and costs without any tangible returns or profits.
The problem could expand behind the scope of just unjustified investments and costs, for
example, in banking industry the business objectives could be to introduce a secure online
transactions, anti-fraud systems, multi-authentication mechanisms that ensure the highest
protection against online hacking. Consequently, IT solutions and services must comply with those
critical business objectives to avoid any operational risks such as credit cards hacking (Thiel, 2008).
Ultimately, the extreme misalignment could put the entire business under a critical risk of losing
its reputation, customers trust and eventually being out of business. In addition, IT services and
solutions play a critical role in today’s healthcare systems, for example, patients’ records and
history, medical perceptions and treatments, and surgeries are all stored and maintained by
utilising IT services and solutions (Turan & Palvia, 2014). However, if IT services and solutions
failed to keep patients’ records consistent and available the patients’ lives could be in a severe risk
(Turan & Palvia, 2014).
Clemons & Weber (1990) discussed that IT services investments should be aligned with certain
criteria and aspects, for example, risk mitigation, cost-reduction, and resources optimisation and
value creation. Today’s IT solutions utilise a diverse number of organisations resources and assets,
for example, people, process and another technologies in order to sustain the business and
provide innovative and agile opportunities. However, without a control system, governance and IT
management system the IT services would significantly diverge from the main business strategic
plans and goals (Juiz & Toomey, 2015). In order words, IT services could introduce a digital
solution such as customer relationship management (CRM) package in order to satisfy a business
requirement, which could enhance the customer services. However, the IT solution mightn’t be
cost-effective, prone to security threats and privacy theft and very complex to deploy.
Thus the IT services instead of driving the business goals and objectives, they became an
obstacle and showstopper. Similarly, when IT services was introduced without incorporating the
strategic and long-term vision of the business, those solutions and services mightn’t be agile
enough to enable the business to grow and expand. For example, when IT services don’t adopt
loose-coupling, service oriented architecture (SOA) and building blocks mind-set, then the
business would be staggered and couldn’t approach any innovative solutions or opportunities. On
the other hand, beginning with the end in mind philosophy would address many critical elements

such as why, how, what and who questions that determine the answers for long-term strategic IT
solutions planning that enables the IT practice to be agile and dynamic rather than providing and
delivering one-off and on-spot solutions (Shirazi et al., 2009). Ultimately, that leads to
acknowledging the critical issue in today’s enterprises, which is the alignment or misalignment
between IT services and business strategies.
1.4 Aims & Objectives
Many organisations consider IT services investments difficult to be justified (Dos Santos, 1991).
Hence the problem of IT expenditures and costs come across the executives’ agenda and the fix
that most of executives would mandate is cutting IT costs and expenditures. Although there are a
number of models that enable IT executives to justify the expenditures and costs but the
relationship between IT services and business strategies might be blurred and not well defined,
which put the entire business in a significant risk. For example, an organisation could decide to
invest in a monitoring package, which measures the performance and availability key performance
indicators (KPIs) of its online website to sustain a certain level of customers satisfaction based on a
contractual service level agreement (SLA). However, the IT services strategy during the
implementation of that monitoring package fails to consider that business strategy even though
the monitoring package is technically implemented, which eventually would lead to breaching the
SLA and loosing the customers.
This phenomenon is critical since the misalignment between IT services and the business
strategy has a crucial number of implications, for example, financial risks and performance
degradation. Therefore, it became strategically important and critical to identifying and exploring
the organisational factors and drivers that influence the alignment or misalignment between IT
services and the business strategy to run, develop, and optimise the business. Once those factors
and drivers are identified then they need to be quarantined and diagnosed so that their scope of
influence will be examined. In other words, the factors and drivers that influence the alignment or
misalignment between IT services and business strategies wouldn’t have the same magnitude and
impact. Thus each factor or driver needs to be addressed and a level of critically or severity will be
assigned to it. Then mitigation plans would be formulated and articulated to address those factors
and drivers on different levels, for example, micromanagement of the very critical factors.
Hence, addressing the alignment or misalignment between IT services and business strategies
require a specific and to the point set of questions that elicit and identify the influencing factors.
The first question that comes in this process is:
• “What are the organisational factors that influence the alignment or misalignment between IT
services strategy and corporate strategy?”
This question will have a different number of factors and drivers that influence the alignment
or misalignment between IT services and business strategies. Thus, consolidating the findings into
a matrix would introduce a level of modularity and structured approach when addressing those
factors and drivers. For example, the matrix below will be beneficial to list the factors and drivers,
and correlate each of them to the corresponding module.

Table 1.4-1 Factors Matrix (The Author, 2015)
Factor / Driver
Align IT services and solutions
strategies, and business strategies
Misalign IT services and solutions
strategies, and business strategies
Once the alignment and/or misalignment matrix is completed, then the next process should
engage by asking the following question:
• “How do these organisational factors influence the alignment or misalignment between IT
services strategy and corporate strategy?”
Asking this question leads to understand the scope and dimension of each factor and driver. In
other words, once the factors and drivers are identified then the need to understand the scale and
the magnitude that each of those factors and drivers will affect the alignment or misalignment
between IT services and business strategies. For instance, if IT governance is identified as a factor
that aligns IT services and business strategies then this question scrutinises the ‘how’ element that
describes the actual alignment that IT governance will participate, for example, a corporate policy
defines the return on investment (ROI) on IT services by a certain percentage, otherwise those IT
services are not feasible. The matrix below helps capture the ‘how’ element and maps each factor
and driver accordingly.
Table 1.4-2 Factor Implications Matrix (The Author, 2015)
Factor / Driver How align or misalign IT services and solutions, and business strategies
After getting the full picture and understanding the factors and drivers that align and/or
misalign IT services and business strategies then the next critical question comes into the process
by addressing the question below:
• “How can these organisational factors be managed in order to improve the alignment between
IT services strategy and corporate strategy?”
The first two questions are the measuring and probing part and this question is the managing
part. This part consolidates all factors and drivers, and how they influence IT services and business
strategies alignment and/or misalignment into a managerial framework in order to control and
manage them so that organisations can work on improving the alignment between IT services and
business strategies. The management framework would consider the factors and drivers that align
IT services and business strategies and supports those factors and drivers. On the other hand, the
management framework would work on those factors and drivers that misalign IT services and
business strategies to mitigate their influence and eliminate them entirely. Thus, this part leads to
the final process throughout the following question:
• “What are the recommendations on how organisational factors can be managed in order to
improve the alignment between IT services strategy and corporate strategy?”
Ultimately, those recommendations would be the guidance that organisations could
implement to avoid any misalignment between IT services and business strategies or to enrich and
empower the alignment IT services and solutions, and business strategies.

1.5 Significance of the Research
The recommendations create the management framework that integrates other managerial
frameworks to address the alignment and/or misalignment between IT services and business
strategies. For example, if IT governance practice is absent or not functioning then COBIT 5
framework would be the starting point to address IT governance factor (Sakagawa & Yonekawa,
2014). In addition, the recommendations module introduces practical suggestions and solutions
that enable a holistic approach to align IT services and business strategies, for example, integrating
ISO/IEC 20K service management framework and other IT service management frameworks.
Finally, there would be some recommendations regarding IT financial management, cost effective,
agility and adopting different business models such as outsourcing to sustain and maintain the
alignment between IT services and business strategies.
1.6 Research Overview
There is a diverse number of data sources and information that the author utilised to construct
this research, and it is very important to identify the data collection methodology and approach,
which allowed the author to focus on those defined techniques. Data gathering approaches are
categorised into two main mainstreams, which are qualitative and quantitative data sources
(Easterby-Smith et al., 2012). In nutshell, quantitative data sources depend on population of data
collected then apply sampling techniques, which then produce statistical figures regarding the
research topic. On the other hand, qualitative data gathering demands interviews, observations
and surveys or questionnaires as sources of data. In this very research, the author adopted the
qualitative data source and, in particular, the observation approach. Once the data is collected
throughout the observation, then the author conducted a deep analysis about how the observed
organisations manage the IT strategies and align them to the business strategies. Afterwards,
finding the gaps and pitfalls according to today’s standards and frameworks were carried out.
The observation process conducts several questionnaires in order to explore the implemented
processes, the maturity of those processes, the actual execution of the processes, the
understanding of the processes, for example, the questionnaires addressed if the processes were
executed or not, communicated clearly and documented. In addition, the efficiency and
effectiveness of those processes were examined throughout the questionnaires. In addition,
eliciting how IT operations teams and IT managers understood the overall corporate strategies and
how IT should benefit the organisation is mandatory since the lack of understanding could result in
‘just do the job’ attitude, which might affect the overall organisation negatively. In other words,
observing how the IT and business strategies are communicated top-down will reflect how the
operations align the IT and business strategies bottom-up. The captured processes, practices,
behaviours, norms, strategies and execution plans then should be analysed according to today’s
world-class frameworks and standards to find out the gaps between how IT services and business
strategies.
1.7 Motivations behind the Research
It is worth mentioning that the author engaged in many of IT services projects, which means
that the author had a real-life experience in the IT services field. However, the end results of those
IT services projects weren’t the same since there were projects that failed and others that
succeeded. The author didn’t explicitly mean the technical deliverables of the projects; however,
the author went deeper and analysed the value-added to the business after all as a measuring

criteria. For example, some projects weren’t alignment with business objectives and goals because
the business users weren’t satisfied, and others were just kind of investments to utilise the
available IT department budgets without any solid and profound business value realisation, which
were indications of a huge misalignment between IT and business.
Although there is a lot of IT frameworks that drive IT services and solutions projects to be
aligned with business strategies but there weren’t effectively implemented. Hence, the author
decided to identify and explore the factors that influence the alignment or misalignment between
IT services and business strategies. The author wanted to understand in a greater depth and
details why the alignment or misalignment problem happened even through any organisation
could adopt a cohesive roadmap to work on IT services and business strategies alignment by
utilising IT service management best practices and frameworks. In addition, the author targeted to
find out why some organisations work in silos rather than adopting an integrated and structured
processes, which will enable a solid communication flow between IT services and business
strategies.
1.8 Chapter by Chapter
By this we reach the end of Chapter One: Introduction, which covered the areas of:
Background of technology and information technology (IT) in particular, Context of the Problem
and how the alignment or misalignment between IT services and business strategies is a critical
when organisations come to make decisions about IT investments and their implications on the
business performance, Statement of the Problem, which explained the problem in more details,
Aims & Objectives behind the research and what are the questions the author conducted the
research to find out the missing part between IT services and business strategies alignment
process, and the author completed this chapter by highlighting the Significance of the Research,
Overview of the Research, and the Motivation behind the Research.
In Chapter 2: Literature Review, the author examined the literatures that were relevant and
related to identifying and exploring the organisational factors that influence the alignment or
misalignment between IT services and business strategies. The author analysed the materials and
the information written and presented some views and ideas regarding the studied literatures. In
other words, the author worked on those literatures and evaluated how those literatures and the
previous work products helped or didn’t help in identifying and exploring the organisational
factors that influence the alignment or misalignment between IT services and business strategies.
Chapter 3: Methodology is about how the author conducted the research. The main objective of
Chapter 3 is to explain the ways that the author answered the questions, which are listed in
Chapter 1 section 1.4 Aims & Objectives. It also covered the techniques that the author adopted to
collect the required information and data.
Next, Chapter 4: Results & Analysis is about describing and examining the results. The author
scrutinised the date, analysed the findings and presented conclusions and his own perspectives
about the results. The analysis examined also if the questions that are listed in Chapter 1 section
1.4 Aims & Objectives were answered or not, and why. In case if those questions are answered
then the author built upon the answers a practical guidance that would be ready for
implementation in real life. This research ended by Chapter 5: Conclusions and Recommendations,
which summarised the effort done throughout the research and literatures reviews outcome. In
addition, the final chapter reflected on the author experience throughout the research, for
example, what the author personally gained from the research, what the author saw as the

limitations to what he did, and how the author would have done the work differently if the author
was to undertake it again.
“Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe”
Abraham Lincoln.

Chapter 2: Literature Review
2. Chapter 2: Literature Review
2.1 Introduction
Information technology (IT) services were around for several decades and we witnessed a
number of improvements during those decades, for example, the fast growing of the Internet,
mobile, wireless communication and fingerprint authentication (Lientz & Larssen, 2004). In
addition, a lot of organisations adopted IT services rapidly to realise tangible benefits to their
business and customers. Despite of the varieties of the available new IT services, around 40% of
those IT services fail to deliver tangible benefits to the business (Lientz & Larssen, 2004). The
alignment between IT services and business strategies was studied and analysed for more than a
decade until now, however, it still frustrates business executives even after multiple approaches
to model IT and business strategies (Tallon, 2007). In this chapter, the author examined the
literatures that are related to the alignment between IT services and business strategies.
2.2 Literatures Analysis
There are a significant number of work products that addressed the alignment between IT
services & business strategies to elicit those factors that influence the alignment or misalignment
dilemma (Cuenca et al., 2011). One of them is the enterprise engineering (EE) approach that
facilitated a formal dialog in enterprise design (Cuenca et al., 2011). EE utilises enterprise
architecture (EA) frameworks to integrate IT and business domains using a common enterprise
modelling (EM), which enables the organisation to identify the current state ‘as-is’, the desired
state ‘to-be’ and the gap between the two states (Cuenca et al., 2011). Once the gap is analysed
then the organisation will be able to articulate a strategic roadmap to align IT and business
strategies. According to Cuenca et al. (2011), there are two pivotal factors that influence the
alignment between IT services and business strategies, which are external and internal factors.
The external factors are business and IT strategies. The internal factors are the organisation’s
infrastructure and processes, and IT infrastructure and process (Cuenca et al., 2011).

Figure 2.2-1 Enterprise engineering and its architecture (Cuenca et al., 2011)
According to Cuenca et al. (2011) the alignment between IT services and business strategies
wouldn’t be fully achieved using the EE approach since the EA such as The Open Group
Architecture Framework (TOGAF) and Zachman don’t define how to align, what to align, and the
life-cycle phases that could define the IT strategy. In addition, the enterprise modelling (EM)
reference architectures poorly define the IT strategy and its key components (Cuenca et al., 2011).
Therefore, the poor definition of IT strategy including all its aspects and components leads to the
misalignment between IT services and business strategies since the organisation would not have
any guidelines about what to align between IT and business strategies. Thus Cuenca et al. (2011)
introduced a set of new components that define IT strategy and then those components are used
to develop new building blocks in order to be used when aligning IT and business strategies.
According to Cuenca et al. (2011) IT strategy components should be: technology scope, capability
and skills, IT governance, portfolio, alignment maturity model, and data strategy.
Technology scope defines the strategic technologies that could be in line with the business
strategies to support them or could create new strategic opportunities in the future, for example,
cloud services and data analytics (Cuenca et al., 2011). The capability and skills component defines
the required competencies that could participate in creating new business strategies or support
the existing ones (Cuenca et al., 2011). As for the IT governance component, it implements the
required governance over IT strategies to keep them aligned with the business strategies (Cuenca
et al., 2011). They described the portfolio component as the collection of projects and
programmes that enable the business strategic objectives. For the maturity model component, it
assesses the maturity of the alignment between IT and business strategies (Cuenca et al., 2011).
Finally, data strategy component handles the information life cycle within organisations, for
example, creation, protection, storage and security.

Figure 2.2-2 IT Strategy Components (Cuenca et al., 2011)
Although Cuenca et al. (2011) provided a greater insight about IT strategy articulation,
however, it lacked a lot of substantial details. Firstly, the portfolio component wasn’t defined by
any means since portfolio management didn’t consider projects and programmes only, however,
portfolio management includes: applications portfolio, market space the business operates in,
customers portfolio, which the business covers, planned IT projects, existing IT services, retiring IT
services, IT services catalogues and IT services pipelines (Long, 2012). The poor definition of
portfolio component would affect the entire IT strategy (Long, 2012). In addition, technology
scope wasn’t defined in terms of cost & benefits analysis; for example, technologies don’t come
free of charge or risks. The financial management for technology wasn’t included in Cuenca et al.
(2011) model. Critically important topics such as enterprise financial management, outsourcing,
internal or external funding, net present value (NPV) and other financial evaluation processes
were’t mentioned, which makes the implementation of those components difficult.
Figure 2.2-3 Portfolio Management Process (Long, 2012)
The outcome of Cuenca et al. (2011) proposal didn’t address the critical success factors (CSFs)
that IT strategy should achieve to be aligned with the business strategy, for example, cost
reduction, standardised processes, sustain repeatable service levels, risk control, and gain
competitive advantages (Beveridge, 2006). Also, the IT strategy life cycle proposed by Cuenca et
al. (2011) didn’t include continual service improvement (CSI) process, which is a key process to
enable the business agility and cope with the diverse number of challenges that the business has
to confront (Long, 2012). The author saw that there are insufficient execution techniques in

Cuenca et al. (2011) proposal since the IT strategy has to be realised and the transition phase
between the planning and the operation is significantly vital. Hence the proposal introduced
another factor that could lead to a substantial misalignment between IT services and business
strategy. Therefore, Cuenca et al. (2011) identified one factor, which is the poor definition of IT
strategy and its implications, and the author identified the impractically of implementing the
proposal.
Rotim & Komnenić (2011) explained additional factors that Cuenca et al. (2011) didn’t address
while articulating and formulating the IT strategy, which are: the involvement, commitment and
support of the top management, availability of a business strategy, and the vital role of business
analysis before adopting a certain technology (Rotim & Komnenić, 2011). That is, top management
and executives commitment is one of those factors that influence the alignment between IT
services and business strategy. Without the commitment of the top management and the
executives supported by a reliable balanced scorecard (BSC) and solid IT governance framework,
the organisations wouldn’t have the controls about IT investments that ensure detections of
wrong directions and activities, which aren’t aligned with the business strategies (Rotim &
Komnenić, 2011).
Figure 2.2-4 Governance and Management bodies: Roles & responsibilities (Lainhart et al., 2012)
Rotim & Komnenić (2011) adopted a set of COBIT processes, IT BSC and SWOT analysis to
develop an alignment model to clearly define IT strategies and apply key controls. However, the
author argued that the model didn’t identify clearly the roles and responsibilities of the
governance and management bodies respectively (Lainhart et al., 2012). For instance, the
development of IT BSC wasn’t assigned to a certain body, and the following up and evaluation
actions items weren’t determined. According to Lainhart et al. (2012), there is a separation
between the governance and the management bodies as shown in Fig 2.2-4. In addition, Rotim &
Komnenić (2011) model overlooked entirely the vital role of strategy implementation approaches,
for example, bold strokes or long march (Backham, 2008). Consequently, the model didn’t discuss
the resistance and change management due to the implementation of a new strategy. The author
suggested that integrating change & programme management techniques would ensure the
successful implementation of the defined strategies, Fig 2.2-5.
Although Rotim & Komnenić (2011) model mentioned the vital role of enterprise architecture
methodologies but the author saw a substantial insufficient integration with COBIT or ITIL. In other
words, Rotim & Komnenić (2011) didn’t introduce the concept of analysing the current business
state ‘as-is’, articulate and envision the future state ‘to-be’, and find the gaps between the two

architectures to develop a solid roadmap and feasible IT strategy in line with the business strategy
(Gregor et al., 2007). Rotim & Komnenić (2011) identified a critical component in IT and business
strategies development, which is the business analysis practice that handles the business
requirements. However, Rotim & Komnenić (2011) model had no clear process that manages the
requirements management and business analysis practice. Also, TOGAF framework integrates
tightly with requirements management and business analysis practice but Rotim & Komnenić
(2011) didn’t incorporate TOGAF or other framework as an enterprise architecture framework.
Figure 2.2-5 The 7 phases of implementation life cycle (Lainhart et al., 2012)
Kashanchi & Toland (2006) adopted the Strategic Alignment Model (SAM) and worked on the
Information Systems (IS) processes quadrant so that ITIL framework would fit into it and bridges
the gap between IT services and business strategies Fig 2.2-6. The participation of ITIL provides IT
infrastructure guidance about how Information Systems (IS) processes deal with the configuration
of software, hardware, communication and data architectures (Kashanchi & Toland, 2006). In
addition, ITIL processes enable the IT organisations to design and execute business strategies
(Kashanchi & Toland, 2006). The integration between ITIL framework and Strategic Alignment
Model (SAM) enables the IT organisations to develop the required skills to engage with the
business units and formulate a cohesive managerial and operational mind-set (Kashanchi &
Toland, 2006). However, the author argued that the proposed model lacks very crucial elements.
ITIL and Strategic Alignment Model (SAM) integration model didn’t consider the enterprise
architecture end-to-end (Bernard, 2012).
The author argued that Kashanchi & Toland (2006) approach didn’t consider strategy,
business, and technology integration and think about the enterprise holistically. Instead,
Kashanchi & Toland (2006) focused mainly on a single quadrant and overlooked IT strategy,
business strategy, and organisational infrastructure and processes quadrants. That is, the
enterprise wouldn’t be able to address its 'as-is’ state, ‘to-be’ state and find out the gaps between
the two states, which will enable the enterprise to align IT services and business strategies
(Bernard, 2012). Kashanchi & Toland (2006) model didn’t incorporate ITIL as an IT governance
framework (Nabiollahi & bin Sahibuddin, 2008), which introduced a significant risk of misaligning
IT services and business strategies (Lainhart, 2012). Additionally, the author argued that the
interfaces between IT and business to work collaboratively and consistently weren’t introduced as
part of ITIL, for example, Business Relationship Management (BRM), demand management and
financial management processes (Nabiollahi & bin Sahibuddin, 2008).

Figure 2.2-6 ITIL Strategic Alignment Model (Kashanchi & Toland, 2006)
Holland & Skarke (2008) identified a critical organisational factor that influences the alignment
between IT services and business strategies, which is the importance of envisioning the IT
initiatives as business projects enabled by IT project (BPITs) and not as only IT projects. This
approach is a significant paradigm shift and mandates a solid redefinition of executives’ roles and
responsibilities (Holland & Skarke, 2008). In addition, BPITs proposal suggested reengineering the
IT organisation structure to adhering to Run the Business (RTB), Grow the Business (GTB), Change
the Business (CTB), and Transform the Business (TTB) processes (Holland & Skarke, 2008). Thus
Holland & Skarke (2008) articulated a 4 steps model to enable a cohesive IT-business alignment.
First, preparing the IT organisation for the alignment, which means the readiness to accept the
changes, adopt innovative solutions, and mitigate risks (Holland & Skarke, 2008). Secondly, senior
executives should be accountable for the IT-business alignment initiative by assigning roles and
responsibilities to them and involve them in that project (Holland & Skarke, 2008).
Thirdly, leadership and how this paradigm shift requires innovative and visionary leaders to
enable this initiative (Holland & Skarke, 2008). Finally, senior executive should advocate and
support the IT-business alignment initiative (Holland & Skarke, 2008). In principle, Holland &
Skarke (2008) model seemed to be unique since they addressed the IT services and business
strategies alignment dilemma through a top-down approach, however, the author argued that
some substantial components were missing, specially when addressing the roles and
responsibilities for senior executives, Fig 2.2-7 is an example (Van Grembergen et al., 2003). The
model provided by Holland & Skarke (2008) isn’t practically implementable because it lacks the
measurement component and how the Balanced Scorecard is tremendously vital to enable senior
executives aligning IT services and business strategies (Van Grembergen et al., 2003). In addition,
preparing the IT services to align with business strategies without a solid and very well established
configuration management (CM) practice and configuration management database (CMDB) would
harm the project drastically (Nagendra et al., 2013).

Figure 2.2-7 Key Roles, Responsibilities and Relationships (Lainhart et al., 2012)
Holland & Skarke (2008) model didn’t mention the critical and vital role of governance and
how a consistent government model should overarch the IT services to be aligned with business
strategies (Lainhart et al., 2012). In addition, the author saw that project portfolio management
process wasn’t positioned within Holland & Skarke (2008), which drastically leads to the
misalignment between IT services and business strategies (Murer et al., 2011). Holland & Skarke
(2008) suggested preparing the IT organisation, however, they didn’t discuss any organisational
structures, for example, Service Provider Type 1, Type 2 or Type 3 (Cannon, 2011). The author
commented on the 4 steps model and argued that the IT strategy definition and articulation
weren’t disused, for example, every organisation should have IT strategy, IT service strategy, and
IT service management strategy, which define the IT strategic goals in line with the business goals,
design how IT services should realise values to business services, and develop how IT services are
managed and maintained in order to support the business operations respectively (Cannon, 2011).
Luftman & Brier (1999) identified a set of factors that inhibit the alignment between IT services
and business strategy, which are: IT and business lack close relationship, IT management doesn’t
demonstrate leadership, IT and business don’t understand each other, IT can’t commit on
projects, senior executives don’t support IT, and IT fails to prioritise projects (Luftman & Brier,
1999). They created a list of factors that enable the alignment between IT services and business
strategy, which are the opposite of the inhibitors (Luftman & Brier, 1999). It is worth mentioning
that Luftman & Brier (1999) crystallised an approach that considered IT and business strategic
alignment as a process and it has 6 steps, which are: setting the goals and establishing teams,
understanding the business and IT relationship, analysing and prioritising any gaps between IT and
business, determining the required actions and implementing a solid project management
practice, choosing and evaluating critical success factors (CSFs), and finally sustain the alignment
(Luftman & Brier, 1999).
The problem that the author found about this approach is the order of the steps. Practically, it
is unrealistic to set goals without understanding the relationship between IT and business, for
example, building an enterprise architecture that models the business services and IT solutions
would help IT and business understand the relationship and dependencies between each other Fig
2.2-8 (Bernard, 2012). Once the IT solutions and business services are modelled, then senior
executives would gain a deeper understanding of how IT solutions affect the business and where
the misalignment happens (Martin et al., 2009). This leads to the next step, which is carrying out
the gap analysis between the current model ‘as-is’ and the future model ‘to-be’ in order to align IT
services with business strategy such as reduce cost and increase customer (Martin et al., 2009).
Accordingly, the goals would be very well defined and the corresponding team should be
established in order to work on a strategic roadmap that fulfils the business requirements and
support the initiative, which has Chief Information Officer (CIO), Chief Architect and Architecture
board (Martin et al., 2009).

Figure 2.2-8 Enterprise Architecture – Modelling (Martin et al., 2009)
The authors claimed that defining the critical success factors (CSFs) and key performance
indicators (KPIs) should be defined before embarking the implementation project by establishing a
service portfolio management practice, which assesses and evaluates the feasibility of any IT
project and how this project is inline with the overall business strategy (Cannon, 2011). That is, the
project management office (PMO) should be established with a clear scope of work and defined
objectives of the entire project. Luftman & Brier (1999) didn’t address the importance of
governance practice to overarch the implementation and control any divergence that could
happen (Cannon, 2011). Once the implementation is complete, a continual service improvement
(CSI) practice should be established in order to keep IT services innovative and inline with the
business strategy (Cannon, 2011). In order to sustain the alignment, a goal-based approach should
be adopted, for example, any new initiative should be linked to the entire organisation goals and
track the value ‘end-to-end’ that initiative would realise, see Fig 2.2-9 (Lainhart, 2012).
Figure 2.2-9 Goals Cascade (Lainhart, 2012)
Sandkuhl et al. (2014) claimed IT-business alignment should embrace and revamp the business
capabilities. Thus today’s organisations should consider the business services that deliver values to

their customers and aligned with the overall organisation’s strategic goals (Sandkuhl et al., 2014).
Hence the enterprise IT would be a strategic enabler to those customers-centric business services
to achieve the enterprise’s strategic goals and objectives. Ultimately, the IT solutions should be in
line with the business strategies (Sandkuhl et al., 2014). The missing parts in Sandkuhl et al. (2014)
proposal are: enterprise IT control objects (De Haes et al., 2010) and IT criteria for evaluating,
selecting and monitoring enterprise IT solutions and services (Dutta & Koritala, 2010). The author
argued that without solid and robust evaluation, selection and monitoring processes; IT services
would fail to meet the business services’ requirements, which leads to a significant misalignment
afterwards (Dutta & Koritala, 2010). Metrics such as capabilities, usability, security, and Return on
Investment (ROI) are missing in Sandkuhl et al. (2014) model.
Figure 2.2-10 Business-IT Alignment (Trienkens et al., 2014)
Trienekens et al. (2014) model addressed significant factors that influence the alignment
between IT services and business strategies. For instance, Trienekens et al. (2014) showed that IT
projects and solutions should be in connection with the business requirements. In addition, the IT
side isn’t the only responsible about the alignment exercise; however, the business side also
shares the responsibility with the IT side (Trienekens et al., 2014). They found that many strategic
alignment models are very conceptual and very difficult to be transformed to a practical
implementation. The author strongly agreed with Trienekens et al. (2014) later finding since many
scholars addressed the alignment problem hypothetically and didn’t introduce a guideline about
the actual delivery of such models (Trienekens et al., 2014). In order to achieve the strategic

alignment between IT services and business strategies, Trienekens et al. (2014) proposed a
framework that covers some certain pillars, which are: Intention & Support, Working Relationship,
Share Domain Knowledge, IT Projects & Planning, and IT Performance, Fig 2.2-10.
The model in Fig 2.2-10 covered almost many factors that influence the alignment between IT
services and business strategies; for example, Intention & Support dimension addressed the
resources allocation, value realisation and vision communication (Trienekens et al., 2014). In
addition, Working Relationship dimension handled the communication issues between the
business owners and IT experts in addition to the partnership between the two domains such as
project prioritisation, business case, and SWOT analysis (Trienekens et al., 2014). The author found
the Shared Domain Knowledge is very vital since IT should understand the business end-to-end,
and also the business should understand the IT solutions holistically. IT Projects & Planning pillar
was always missing in several research, however, Trienekens et al. (2014) introduced this part as a
significant factor that enables the alignment between IT services and business strategies. Finally,
IT Performance dimension is the discipline that enforces innovation, creativity and agility in IT
services in order to introduce ‘fit-for-purpose’ solutions, which support the business strategies
(Trienekens et al., 2014).
Although the proposed model by Trienekens et al. (2014) seemed to be complete, however,
the author had some crucial comments about the model. First, the model wasn’t processes-based,
which makes it difficult to adopt. In other words, IT Projects & Planning factor, as an example,
didn’t have any clear processes that describe the workflow of project management and planning,
which could negatively affect the entire proposed model (PMI, 2013). Furthermore, the author
described the Intention & Support, and Working Relationship dimensions as one pillar, which is
Governance for Enterprise IT (De Haes et al., 2010). Incorporating IT Governance, Risk and
Compliance (GRC) wasn’t clearly addressed by Trienekens et al. (2014) model, which introduced a
critical risk of having IT services and business strategies misaligned (Lainhart et al., 2012). Even
though the proposed model addressed many critical factors, the author argued that without the
enterprise architecture and modelling practice of the enterprise, the alignment discipline would
not be able to find the gaps and then articulates a roadmap in order to manage these gaps
(Bernard, 2012).
2.3 Summary
The alignment between IT services and business strategies is one of the critical problems that
today’s executives are struggling to find a consistent and persistent framework in order to enable
them transform the business (Lientz & Larssen, 2004). However, the author found a noticeable
disconnection between the scholars’ work and models because each model considered only one
perspective of the organisation and developed the hypotheses to match that perspective.
Overlooking Services Portfolio Management (SPM) leads to missing enterprise financial
management, funding strategies, services evaluation methodologies such as NPV or IRR (Long,
2012). Furthermore, the proposed model by Cuenca et al. (2011) didn’t shape how CSFs of an IT
Strategy should be developed, delivered and managed. Since the involvement of executives and
senior executives is mandatory to realise the alignment. Rotim & Komnenić (2011) proposed a
cohesive integration of COBIT, IT BSC and EA to achieve the alignment, however, they emphasised
that without defining executives and senior executives roles & responsibilities such alignment
wouldn’t be realised.
The pitfall of Rotim & Komnenić (2011) model relied on the lack of IT governance and IT
management definition (Lainhart et al., 2012), In other words, roles & responsibilities matrix

wasn’t introduced (Lainhart et al., 2012). Kashanchi & Toland (2006) didn’t incorporate other
potential factors such as the implementation approaches to realise IT strategy, enterprise-
modelling techniques, and the gap analysis processes and strategic roadmap definition practice.
But they positioned ITIL processes within the Strategic Alignment Model (SAM) Information
Systems (IS) processes quadrant. However, the implementation of this positioning is very weak
because many ITIL processes were omitted (Long, 2012). In addition, the model completely
overlooked the enterprise architecture and modelling practices (Bernard, 2012). However, the
author saw that approach is significantly weak because it was another theoretical and hypothetical
trial without any real-life implementation guidance (Trienekens et al., 2014). The most critical
pitfall in this model was the complete absence of governance of enterprise IT, which is the main
driver towards IT and business alignment in today’s ubiquitous IT (De Haes et al., 2010).
Holland & Skarke (2008) approach was about the importance of envisioning the IT projects as
business projects enabled by those IT projects (BPITs). Also the initiation of any IT project should
be linked to a business project that requires the introduction of a new business service or the
realisation of a new business strategy (Holland & Skarke, 2008). They argued that IT projects
should be inline with the business lifecycles such as Run the Business (RTB), Grow the Business
(GTB), and Transform the Business (TTB) processes, and any IT projects that don’t fulfil such
categories should be discarded. The author strongly supported this perspective, however, this
approach lacked the practically and it was just a visionary approach that today’s executives should
adopt (Holland & Skarke, 2008). That perspective didn’t incorporate any roles & responsibly matrix
to enforce that approach (Van Grembergen et al., 2003).
Luftman & Brier (1999) proposed a model that had 6 steps approach to align IT services and
business strategies, which are: setting the goals and establishing teams, understanding the
business and IT relationship, analysing and prioritising any gaps between IT and business,
determining the required actions and implementing a solid project management practice,
choosing and evaluating CSFs, and finally sustain the alignment (Luftman & Brier, 1999). The
author argued that this approach wasn’t implementable and it was very theoretic in nature. For
example, the processes should be rearranged in order to reflect the enterprise vision, business
strategies, and IT services end-to-end then understand how each component interacts with the
other (Bernard, 2012) Consequently, the goals and objectives of IT services could be architected
inline with the business strategies that enable the enterprise vision (Martin et al., 2009). Luftman
& Brier (1999) didn’t address the importance of governance practice to overarch the
implementation and control any divergence that could happen (Cannon, 2011).
According to Sandkuhl et al. (2014), IT-business alignment should embrace and revamp the
business capabilities. In other words, today’s organisations should consider the business services
that deliver values to their customers and aligned with the overall organisation’s strategic goals
(Sandkuhl et al., 2014). The missing parts in Sandkuhl et al. (2014) proposal were: enterprise IT
control objects, IT criteria for evaluating, selecting and monitoring enterprise IT solutions (Dutta &
Koritala, 2010). The author argued that without solid and robust evaluation, selection and
monitoring processes; IT services and solutions would fail to meet the business services’
requirements, which leads to a significant misalignment afterwards (Dutta & Koritala, 2010).
Trienekens et al. (2014) showed that IT projects and solutions should be in connection with the
business requirements. In addition, the IT side isn’t the only responsible about the alignment
exercise; however, the business side also shares the responsibility with the IT side (Trienekens et
al., 2014).

Figure 2.3-1 Holistic Enterprise Alignment (Trienekens et al., 2014)
However, the author had some crucial comments about the model. First, the model wasn’t
processes-based, which makes it difficult to adopt (Bernard, 2012). Even though the proposed
model addressed many critical factors, the author argued that without the enterprise architecture
and modelling practice of the enterprise, the alignment discipline wouldn’t be able to find the
gaps and then articulates a roadmap to manage these gaps (Bernard, 2012). Eventually, it was
crystal clear that all the proposed models mainly focused on the IT-Business units of the
organisation and overlooked the organisational factors such as culture, management, people,
skills, and policies & processes (Lee, 2013). The author also identified a lack of implementation
guidance that enables transforming IT and business towards effective alignment and efficient
operations. Additionally, the scholars didn’t mention any practical tools. It means adopting any
models or framework would need a great investigation to find the right tools, which would
introduce another cost, risk and overhead.
“You have to learn the rules of the game. And then you have to play better than anyone else”
Albert Einstein.

Chapter 3: Research Methodologies
3. Chapter 3: Research Methodologies
3.1 Introduction
The author reviewed the literatures related to identifying and exploring the organisational
factors that influence the alignment and/or misalignment between IT services and business
strategies in Chapter 2: Literatures Review. Yet the author began explaining the processes and
ways required to answer the questions introduced in Chapter 1: Introduction section 1.4: Aims &
Objectives pages 10,11 and 12. The purpose of Chapter 3: Research Methodologies is to describe
the research design and techniques. In addition, the author explained the research methodologies
used throughout the research and the reasons behind choosing those methodologies.
Furthermore, Chapter 3: Research Methodologies identified the key participants in the research
and their attributes, for example, locations and industries. The author described his role and
participation during the research and how his prior experience affected the research. Chapter 3:
Research Methodologies covered a detailed description of data gathering techniques and the tools
used. Finally, the author explained the data analysis approaches and the rational behind involving
those approaches as well as the trustworthiness of the methodologies used.
3.2 Management Research Methodologies
A quality research has some certain attributes that the author incorporated to produce a high
standard research (Easterby-Smith et al., 2012). For instance, designing the research outline and
deciding the methodology or methodologies required to gathering the information are key
features of any research (Easterby-Smith et al., 2012). In addition, there is a political part while
conducting any research and the author had to sustain and control any resistance that affected his
research due to political concerns (Easterby-Smith et al., 2012). Before discussing the research
methodologies, the author addressed the data types that any researcher manipulated, which are
qualitative and quantitative (Bernard, 2011). Quantitative data has a numerical characteristic,
therefore, it requires a quantitative research to generate and manipulate numbers using statistical
analysis (van Griensven et al., 2014). Quantitative research mandates the researchers to emphasis
on experiments to either confirm or reject a pre-determined hypothesis, measurements, and
statistical analysis (Easterby-Smith et al., 2012).
On the other hand, the research methodologies consist of another research type, which
handles the quantitative data. In essence, quantitative data has some kind of material and
information that can’t be quantified, for example, interviews, texts, observations, and other non-
verbal communications (van Griensven et al., 2014). Therefore, the qualitative research integrates
with personal experience, meanings and social context rather than numbers or statistical analysis
(van Griensven et al., 2014). However, it could happen to conduct a qualitative analysis using a
quantitative data in order to search for and presentation of meaning in results of quantitative
processing (Bernard, 2011). Additionally, quantitative analysis could be conducted using
qualitative data, which could turn worlds into numbers (Bernard, 2011). It’s worth mentioning that
each data type differs in how it’s collected (Easterby-Smith et al., 2012). For instance, qualitative
data could be gathered using natural language, for example, interviews, and observations. On the
other hand, qualitative data requires a different set of gathering techniques, for example,
sampling, surveys ‘questionnaires’ and observational data (Easterby-Smith et al., 2012).

Table 3.2-1 Qualitative & Quantitative analysis (Bernard, 2011)
Analysis Data
Qualitative Quantitative
Qualitative Interpretive text studies.
Hermeneutics, Grounded
Theory
Search for and presentation of
meaning in results of
quantitative processing
Quantitative Turning words into numbers.
Classic Content Analysis, Word
Counts, Free Lists, etc.
Statistical and mathematical
analysis of numeric data
3.3 Research Methodology
The author conducted a quantitative research to identify and explore the organisational
factors that influence the alignment and/or misalignment between IT services and business
strategies. The reasons behind using quantitative research were: the author argued that
qualitative research mandates conducting interviews and questioning participants regarding the IT
services performance and their alignment with the business, which could be seen as criticising
their work and that would lead to inconsistent answers (Easterby-Smith et al., 2012). In addition,
the author confronted some senior managers who turned the interview to be a ‘non-directive’
interview and that wouldn’t lead to elicit any solid answers, and would change the course of the
interview (Easterby-Smith et al., 2012). Also many managers and executives were very busy with
limited time to attend face-to-face interview and lock themselves in their office to run a single
interview. That is, the author found arranging a face-to-face interview very difficult and required
traveling to many locations and countries.
In addition, quantitative research enabled the author to incorporate some flexibility in
examining and assessing the relationship amongst different and multiple variables (Chebrolu &
Ness, 2013). That is, quantitative research allowed the author to build statistical reports and
charts that assign weight to variable and map them to the alignment and/or misalignment
percentage accordingly. Furthermore, implementing a quantitative research methodology gave
the author a significant opportunity to manipulate the collected data to elicit the factors that were
deployed and/or not deployed within organisations throughout scoring techniques and easily
represent that data in a scorecard. Quantitative research methodology provided a substantial
feature, which is the capability of utilising sampling techniques in order to collect the data (Khaiata
& Zualkernan, 2009). In that regards, sampling enabled the author to specify groups of participants
and plot the data respectively. The author, adopting quantitative research, had the capability to
generate different scenarios and analyse diverse probabilities to be able to articulate
recommendations based on solid mathematical equations.
3.4 Tools & Techniques
In this section, the author explained the tools & techniques used in his research. Since the
author decided to utilise a quantitative research methodology, then the available tools &
techniques were: surveys, observational data and databases (Easterby-Smith et al., 2012). Surveys
have more than one approach, for example, self-completion questionnaires and interviewer-
administrated questionnaires (Easterby-Smith et al., 2012). Each approach has sub-categories, for
example, self-completion questionnaires could be postal questionnaire surveys or web-based
surveys (Easterby-Smith et al., 2012). On the other hand, interviewer-administrated
questionnaires have two sub-categories, which are structured interview surveys and telephone

interview surveys (Easterby-Smith et al., 2012). The author, however, found the web-based
surveys more convenient and flexible to implement since that approach enabled the author to
send an electronic-based questionnaire throughout the Internet and reach many participants
more than the other approaches. The Internet-based questionnaire completed online and the data
was automatically stored in an online database, which gave the author a significant mobility and
dynamic access to the questionnaire results (Easterby-Smith et al., 2012).
In addition, Internet-based questionnaire enabled the author to build and design user-friendly
survey that incorporated drop-down menus, check boxes and multiple-choice questions (Easterby-
Smith et al., 2012). Moreover, using the technology gave the author the power of integrating the
survey data results with spread sheet packages to run sophisticated analysis and fine the results
(Easterby-Smith et al., 2012). The author went through the exercise of finding an appropriate web-
based survey provider and there are many providers that offer different flavours of web-based
survey capabilities such as Qualtrics (www.qualtrics.com) and Surveymonkey
(www.surveymonkey.com) (Easterby-Smith et al., 2012). However, the author decided to use
FreeOnlineSurveys (www.freeonlinesurveys.com) due to several reasons. First of all, it provided a
student bundle, which had a reduced cost but comes with full features. Secondly,
FreeOnlineSurveys enabled the author to design the questionnaire incorporating unlimited
number of questions and pages. Thirdly, the author filtered the results, got full individual results,
ran live results analysis and modelled the responses using overlay technology.
3.5 The Researcher Roles
The author wore multiple hats during his research. In other words, the author roles varied
depending on the research requirements and needs. For instance, the author incorporated his
personal experience and observations during managing several projects across different countries.
In addition, there were a lot of situations that the author confronted over the years, which
affected the research course and introduced a significant spectrum of information. Therefore,
consolidating the author personal experience and incorporate it with the research design
supported shaping the questionnaire, identifying the critical questions and topics to emphasise,
and articulating the required participants and industries who benefited the research. The author
personal experience added a layer of ‘sense-making’ when designing the questions and the
suggested answers within the questionnaire’s body; for example, the author used his experience
to judge how the participants understood the questions and how the suggested answers were
sufficient.
The author, however, adopted a philosophical position to undertake his research. According to
Easterby-Smith et al. (2012), a researcher would wear the ontology hat or epistemology hat. In
essence, ontology is a philosophical perspective that sets assumptions about the nature of reality
(Easterby-Smith et al., 2012). On the other hand, epistemology perspective articulates some
statements about some tools and ways of elicitation the nature of the world (Easterby-Smith et
al., 2012). The author, on the other hand, utilised the epistemology perspective since the author
designed some statements in form of a questionnaire, which enabled him to understand the
behaviour of the organisations regarding the alignment and/or misalignment between IT services
and business strategies. However, epistemology perspective has two different contrasting views,
which are positivism and social constructionism that indicate how a research would be conducted
(Easterby-Smith et al., 2012).

On one hand, positivism view is considered about the social world existence and how it does
exist externally, however, the properties of that world should be measured using some objective
methodologies instead of gathering their criteria using reflection or intuition (Easterby-Smith et
al., 2012). On the other hand, social constructionism considers reality or the social world as
socially constructed and not objective, and people give it its meaning (Easterby-Smith et al., 2012).
In essence, social constructionism is about people experience and thinking about the reality since
it is not objective (Easterby-Smith et al., 2012). The author’s role was adopting social
constructionist perspective to elicit how people give meaning to the IT services and business
strategies alignment and/or misalignment and how different factors can influence such dilemma.
As a social constructionist, the author was part of the problem under research since he had a
significant experience facing the problem in his real-life implementations and projects.
The reasons behind adopting social constructionist perspective were: it enabled the author to
understand the organisational factors that influence the alignment and/or misalignment between
IT services and business strategies. In addition, social constructionism view depends on gathering
rich data then the ideas and recommendations will be induced, which actually what the author
aimed to conduct through the research questionnaire (Easterby-Smith et al., 2012). As a social
constructionist, the author incorporated a diverse number of IT and business stakeholders
perspectives, which were captured via the web-based questionnaire. However, social
constructionism view has its own variation, for example, as a social constructionist, a researcher
could adopt either constructionism or strong constructionism (Easterby-Smith et al., 2012). Yet
strong constructionism has some implications and difficulties, for example, strong constructionism
could be very time consuming, and an author has a limited timeframe to conclude the research
(Easterby-Smith et al., 2012). In addition, the analysis and interpretations of the collected data
could be difficult (Easterby-Smith et al., 2012). Therefore, the author aimed to conclude the
research adopting constructionism view.
The pivotal role and the heart of what the author conducted was the questionnaire
administration part. For instance, the author was the key orchestrator of questionnaire design;
sending invitations to participants, live data monitoring, and data analysis and results reporting
processes. In addition, the author had the administration privilege to FreeOnlineSurveys
(www.freeonlinesurveys.com) website. Furthermore, the author had the full access to
FreeOnlineSurveys (www.freeonlinesurveys.com) website database, which was the online
repository that stored the collected data from the participants and it was the database that the
author used in order to plot different chars, tables and graphs. The author, however, had the
access to upload the contacts, which were the questionnaire participants and he tracked
individuals’ responses, applied overlay filters and different data mining and analysis techniques
using external tools. Finally, the author was responsible of questionnaire branding and
customisations such as adding unique logo, creating new templates and controlling the colour
schemes.
3.6 Questionnaire Design
Yet the author explained the meta-architecture of the questionnaire and how the
questionnaire was designed. Before the author started and dig deeply into the heart of the
questionnaire design and architecture, it was worth mentioning some questionnaire design ‘best
practices’ that the author adopted and took them into consideration while articulating and
forming the building blocks of the questionnaire. In order to comply with the principles of good
design, the author adhered to expressing only one idea per question during designing the entire

questionnaire (Easterby-Smith et al., 2012). That is, each question was clear and ‘to the point’
without any ambiguity or multiple possible answers. The second critical principle the author
adhered was to avoiding any jargon and colloquialisms (Easterby-Smith et al., 2012). Any complex
and unknown expressions might affect the questions negatively and put the questionnaire
integrity at risk. The third key principle is to use simple expressions such as active tense rather
than the passive tense (Easterby-Smith et al., 2012). Criticality, the author avoided any negatives
while building the questions in order to avoid any misleading answers or confusion. Finally, the
golden rule was to ask questions that were not leading questions (Easterby-Smith et al., 2012).
Fig 3.6-1 Questionnaire Core Factors demonstrated the meta-architecture of the questionnaire
and showed the factors that the author identified and collected through Chapter 2: Literature
Review. The ultimate goal of Fig 3.6-1 Questionnaire Core Factors was to act as a ‘gateway’ to the
web-based version of the questionnaire, which used FreeOnlineSurveys
(www.freeonlinesurveys.com). The author used Fig 3.6-1 Questionnaire Core Factors building
blocks and translated them into questions that enabled the participates to contribute in the
questionnaire. Hence, once the questionnaire was fully developed using FreeOnlineSurveys
(www.freeonlinesurveys.com), the author sent invitations to the participants to complete the
online questionnaire. Fig 3.6-1 Questionnaire Core Factors had some critical dimensions such as
enterprise architecture practice, project management, business analysis, IT service management,
skills & developments, roles & responsibilities, IT strategy, business strategy and leadership. Each
dimension of these was critical and vital in order to alignment IT services and business strategies
as concluded in Chapter 2: Literature Review.
In order to produce a quality questionnaire, the author embarked in comprehensive processes,
which enabled the author to complete the questionnaire design phase covering all aspects and
elements. Fig 3.6-2 Questionnaire Design Processes illustrated the processes and steps that the
author implemented to complete and finalise the questionnaire design phase, for example, the
author started his work with literature review process, which fed the results & conclusion process.
In the results and conclusion process, the author got the capability to extract the required
information and data to build and design the meta-architecture building blocks, see Fig 3.6-1
Questionnaire Core Factors. Once the factors were defined, the author started his documentation
process and Fig 3.6-2 is the work product of Meta-Architecture Design process. Then the author
started the next process, which is the Questions Design phase that inherited the key principles
explained earlier in section 1.6 Questionnaire Design. The outcome of Questions Design phase
enabled the author to start utilising FreeOnlineSurveys (www.freeonlinesurveys.com) to draft the
online version of the questionnaire.

Figure 3.6-1 Questionnaire Core Factors (The Author, 2015)

The process, Draft Questionnaire, had a loop-based property since the author was keen
enough to ensure that all questions were covered by the online version. Once the questions were
captured and implemented in the web-based tool FreeOnlineSurveys the author started the
validation and reviewing process, which allowed the author to perform consistency check and
correct any mistakes such as spelling, grammar, etc. Hence, the web-based version of the
questionnaire was ready and the author prepared a list of participants in order to send
participation invitations along side with publishing the questionnaire URL. The author launched
the Live Results tool, which is part of the FreeOnlineSurveys portal in order to keep tracking the
data feeds and the collected data. The data was stored electronically on FreeOnlineSurveys online
database, which gave the author the full access to the results anytime, anywhere. The author
monitored the results and data to evaluate the inputs and determine if the inputs were enough to
start the analysis process.
Figure 3.6-2 Meta-Architecture Design process (The Author, 2015)

The estimated timeframe for the data collection and analysis was 2 months, which gave the
author the time required to get a decent amount of samples. After that, the author initiated the
process of storing the data into different forms and formats such as pie charts and graphs as a
preparation to the next process, which was building reports and conclusion. The process, results
and conclusion, was a pivotal process and very critical when the author started building Chapter 4:
Results & Analysis since it incorporated different activities, for example, data mining, statistical
analysis and correlating the data capture towards the core purpose of the questionnaire. The final
process was storing the final data and results into FreeOnlineSurveys online database alongside
with extracting all work packages and reports in order to store and archive them for further needs.
The author listed the questions and samples of the online questionnaire in Appendix A. In
addition, the author added a sample screenshot of FreeOnlineSurveys design studio as shown in
Fig 3.6-3.
Figure 3.6-3 FreeOnlineSurveys (www.freeonlinesurveys.com, 2015)
3.7 Participants & Industries
The scope that the author indented to include was the organisation end-to-end. In other
words, the scope of the questionnaire included different participants across the organisation and
it wasn’t limited to a certain sector or group of personas. For example, the author engaged with
many stakeholders during his projects and he got several contacts and connections that he utilised
to conduct the questionnaire. As a matter of fact, any IT organisation the author worked with had
networks and systems administrators, operations supervisors and heads of IT operations. In
addition, today’s IT organisations, professionals services organisations and systems integrations
got a significant amount of projects in form of ‘outsourcing’ different IT functions, for example,
the author was one of those systems integrators in EMEA market and had the opportunity to
implement diverse number of projects across different industries. The participants’ scope,
however, extended to include executives and senior managers whom were accessible via email or
had time to complete the questionnaire.
Bottom line is, the author made a comprehensive usage of his contacts that he gained over the
years and the list of contacts covered all stakeholders that any IT organisation had as mentioned

earlier. Furthermore, the author experience included heterogeneous industries, for example, the
author had the opportunity to implement complex project in oil & gas sectors as well as banking
institutes. Moreover, the author vertical experience focused on telecommunication organisations
and services providers across EMEA. That is, the author leveraged the questionnaire across several
industries that captured the IT services and business strategies alignment and/or misalignment
dilemma from different perspectives and cultures. Interestingly, the industries the author
incorporated didn’t operate within a single market, however, those industries operated in many
markets across the EMEA. Therefore, the data captured throughout the questionnaire did not
present a single spectrum of markets, however, the data covered was rich and complete since the
industries were different and diverse. The full list of participants and industries added in
conjunction with the questionnaire questions in Appendix A.
3.8 Trustworthiness
Exposing the organisational details and strategies was a significant challenge that the author
had to deal with in a professional manner. For instance, conducting a questionnaire that asked
about IT strategies, business strategies, governance and other core factors that the author
identified in his questionnaire’s meta-architecture Fig 1.6-3 Questionnaire Core Factors raised
some political concerns and data sensitivity issue. It was seen as a security breach or part of
organisation’s confidential assets and consequently the author decided to omit all confidential
information. In addition, organisations details such as name, industry and market were all
removed from the analysis. Furthermore, the participants’ data and details were hidden and not
exposed to any 3rd
party. The author implemented a security mechanism to protect his
questionnaire by applying a ‘password protected’ questionnaire, which prevented any anonymous
attempt to complete the questionnaire without providing the password. The author, in addition,
applied another layer of security and data integrity by disabling participants’ responses tracking
feature, which blocked any attempt to edit the responses. Finally, the author implemented
another security control, which was preventing participants from responding to the questionnaire
more than one time using the same computer.
3.9 Data Analysis
Here the author explained and described the data analysis function and how he applied
different data manipulation to scrutinise the collected data. First of all, utilising FreeOnlineSurveys
portal enabled the author to run different types of reports and filters; for example, the author
filtered the results by date, answer choices and country. In addition, the author incorporated the
visualisation capability that FreeOnlineSurveys provided to visualise the locations statistics and
represent the data easily. The ‘Live Results’ dashboard enabled the author to keep an eye on the
progress of the questionnaire and dynamically manipulate the data and the corresponding
reports. FreeOnlineSurveys allowed the author to regenerate the data in many formats such as
bar, column, line, and pie charts. Furthermore, the author applied different customisations by
dragging and dropping multiple fields and categories altogether in order to consolidate the data
from different sources, which acted as a single scorecard. The author exported the required data
to Microsoft Excel, which leveraged another layer of data manipulation and statistical calculations.
Finally, the author added and annotated the reports in order to give them a meaningful
representation and make them easy to understand.

3.10 Summary
In this section, the author summarised the work package throughout this chapter, Chapter 3:
Research Methodologies. Chapter 3: Research Methodologies started with introduction, which
covered the purpose of the chapter, for example, a description of the research design and
techniques. In addition, the introduction section addressed the data gathering and the author
role. The second section of Chapter 3: Research Methodologies gave an overview of Management
Research Methodologies, which were quantitative and qualitative research methodologies. In
section 1.3 Research Methodology, the author explained his research method, which was
quantitative methodology and how he implemented a questionnaire based data collection
technique. Then the author started section 1.4 Tools & Techniques and illustrated how the
questionnaire was implemented via FreeOnlineSurveys, which is an online questionnaire tool. The
author roles were explained in section 1.5 and a comparison between positivism and social
constructionism perspective was explained. The author, on the other hand, adopted social
constructionism view in order to conduct his research.
Furthermore, the author extended his role to include questionnaire administration, design,
and orchestrating the processes illustrated in Fig 1.6-2 Questionnaire Design Processes. The
author then started section 1.6 Questionnaire Design, which was the core of this chapter since it
identified the key elements and processes that required completing the questionnaire. In addition,
section 1.6 Questionnaire Design illustrated the utilisation of FreeOnlineSurveys and its core tools,
which allowed the author to conduct his activities. Also section 1.6 Questionnaire Design
highlighted how the data reported and stored. The fundamental part of section 1.6 Questionnaire
Design was the meta-architecture of the questionnaire since it explained the questionnaire map
visually. Furthermore, section 1.6 Questionnaire Design had a significant workflow chart that
identified the key and the underlying processes that the author implemented throughout the
questionnaire design phase. Section 1.7 Participants & Industries described the key participants
completed the questionnaire and the core industries, which the questionnaire covered. Sections
1.8 illustrated the importance of trustworthiness and data integrity of the research and finally
section 1.9 highlighted the data analysis part of the research.
Figure 3.10-1 Chapter 3 Elements (The Author, 2015)
“If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough” … Albert Einstein.

The organisational factors that influence the alignment or misalignment between IT services strategy and corporate strategy

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