Strategic IT Alignment in Service Sector

Strategic IT Alignment in Service Sector

Abrar Haider (University of South Australia, Australia) and Sureerat Saetang (University of South Australia, Australia)
Copyright: © 2017 |Pages: 28
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-5225-2084-9.ch012

Abstract

Effective management and governance is key to the business and information technology alignment. Just as business organisations have to be responsive to the changes in their operating environment to remain competitive, they also have to be proactive in leveraging technological resources to sense these changes and take appropriate strategic and operational decisions. Governance of information technologies is not the job of technology administrators; in fact, it is everybody's responsibility. With this recognition and understanding, technology stakeholders are able to assume responsibilities and accountabilities to execute and achieve desirable behaviour in the use of information technologies. This paper presents a case study of a bank in Thailand on how it has embedded governance practices in its social, operational, structural, and technical environment. It concludes that maximization of value from information technologies is dependent upon the technical, cultural, and organisational endorsement of business practices relating to their governance.
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Concept Of It Governance

Different scholars have defined IT governance from different angles. The generally accepted definition of IT governance is about IT responsibilities. This definition, however, takes a very narrow approach of IT governance, whereby the authors only talk about the responsibilities of different managers or employees in the organisation to manage IT. Grembergen (2004) takes a strategic view of IT governance and suggests that IT governance is the organisational capacity exercised by the Board, executive management and IT management to control the formulation and implementation of IT strategy and in this way ensure the fusion of business and IT. The author suggests that in order for IT to function properly in the organisation, alignment between IT strategic business orientation is a must.

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