Business IT alignment through the lens of complexity science

Business IT alignment has been a top concern for academics and corporate managers for over 30 years. Despite a rich literature, it is still far from been an achieved objective in companies. Leveraging on the similarities between Information and Complex Systems, researchers have recently adopted a new perspective to study Information Systems and their alignment with business. The present study is based on an extensive literature review that spans three domains of research: Information Systems, Complexity Science, and Organization Science. The paper proposes to contribute to the study and implementation of alignment by presenting a classification framework for the different alignment approaches exploiting methods derived from Complexity Science. Four types of approaches to alignment are identified and for each of them the potential contribution to alignment dimensions is discussed.