Information-Induced Strategic Alignment: Toward a Semiological Analysis

Abstract

The concept of strategic alignment between organizational policies for business and information systems (IS) has not been defined previously in informational terms. In this paper, we define informational aspects of organizational behavior in three semiological dimensions: pragmatics, semantics and syntactics. We also introduce dynamics as a fourth dimension to address time-related changes. We demonstrate the importance of these ideas in the analysis of strategic alignment by taking recent examples to show how informational attributes are often implicitly discussed in the literature. We believe that the precise definition of the informational aspects of alignment is a necessary prerequisite for the advancement of understanding in this important area.