Research On Strategic Alignment Based Modeling For Information System Application Decision Making

This paper is one of the research projects assisted by Chinese Natural Science Foundation (Grant No. 70171009).It is widely acknowledged that information system plays a more strategic role within an organization than ever before. Strategic use of information system opens many topics for both researchers and practitioners. Strategic alignment, which focuses on the study of the influence and impact of information system on the formulating and implementing process of business strategy within an organization, is one of them and forms an area for research. The achievement of the research in this area establishes a foundation for information technology management activities.Considering the importance of decision-making in information management, this dissertation focus on the decision making problems in information system application area with the attempt of outlining a framework for modeling and solving the decision-making problems under consideration for business organizations. Taking the progresses of strategic alignment research and other related decision-making methods into account, this dissertation makes effort as the following:Put forth a decision-making framework. The proposed framework is not a single model. However, it is a modeling methodology with three levels, a principle level to embody the related strategic alignment theories, a method level to indicate the detailed steps for modeling and solving the decision making problems under consideration, and a application level to show the relationships of decision making activities with other management activities, say, information systems planning and information system projects implementation. Bring forward a systematic model for synthesizing the basic requirements of strategic alignment and use it as the fundamental for modeling decision-making problems in information system application area.Put forward a procedure for modeling the decision-making problems based on some formulated representations of the relationships among elements of business strategy, information system strategy and other fields. The representations of elements are drawn from some well-known strategic alignment models.Furthermore, combined with Analytic Network Process (ANP), give detailed steps of deriving weights of elements of the model by means of some basic concepts of matrix, graphic and set theory. Finally, manifest the significations of the proposed framework to strategic alignment research and information system management practice through a case study.