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Information Technology (IT) has become indispensable strategic resource for many organisations affecting how they do their work and configure their business processes (Cline and Guynes, 2001). Business leaders and entrepreneurs recognise the decisive role of IT in improving the overall organisational performance and realising the business value (Chan and Reich, 2007; Henderson and Venkatraman, 1993). Even though the use of IT has been found to contribute to the performance of organisations, this development has also required organisations to be mindful of the challenges of managing IT in such a way that it contributes to the achievement of the overall organisation objectives. This has brought the issue of strategic alignment, also referred to as business-IT alignment (BITA) to the fore. Since the publication of the first article (Henderson and Venkatraman, 1993) articulating the phenomenon, the alignment between the business strategy and the strategic choices of IT deployment has remained an important research topic in the IS domain. However, according to Luftman and Brier (1999), the critical role of BITA for organisations has already been recognised since the late 1970s.
The continued interest in BITA among researchers in the IS and related research domains is justified, given its relationship with improved organisational performance (Kafi and Kalika, 2005). Review of the literature indicates that the goal of BITA studies converges into three categories (Luftman, 2000; Reich and Benbasat, 2000; Rusu and Jonathan, 2017). The first set of studies are set out to develop and present BITA construct. Others attempt to develop ways of assessing BITA. The remaining studies focus on identifying the internal and external organisational factors, also referred to as the enablers and inhibitors of BITA. However, despite the extensive empirical and conceptual studies, achieving and maintaining BITA remains to be challenging. The debate among practitioner outlets also seems to suggest the importance of BITA for many organisations. One of the most comprehensive IT trend studies conducted across industries in 793 companies (Kappelman et al., 2019) reveals that BITA has been consistently ranked to be among the top three concerns for IT executives for many years in a row.