The effect of Sarbanes-Oxley compliance efforts on business and information technology (IT) alignment: An exploratory study

Recently, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 was adopted by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and has been described as "One of the most influential and controversial-pieces of corporate legislation ever to have hit a statute book" (The Economist, 2005). A hypothesized and perhaps unintended side effect of the required compliance efforts is increased alignment between Information Technology (IT) and business units. The ability for US-based organizations to attain alignment between business and technology departments is a perennial high priority initiative when IT issues are discussed. Existing literature and research on compliance efforts as drivers for alignment are limited. This cross-sectional survey design used a web-based quantitative questionnaire to gather opinions from a sample of business and information technology leaders at United States based publicly traded companies with significant operations in the western part of the country and attempted to answer three research questions: What is the current state of alignment between business and IT departments in sampled organizations? Have efforts to address enterprise-wide compliance initiatives contributed to the degree of alignment currently experienced by business and IT leaders? Based on the current state of alignment, do business and IT leaders surveyed feel those efforts to comply specifically with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 created an environment where business and IT departments have achieved greater alignment? The survey was based on Luftman's (2003) six IT-Business alignment criteria and scoring tool, modified to include specific questions on compliance efforts on alignment. These questions were developed by the researcher to gather evidence on the linkage of Sarbanes-Oxley compliance with the current state of alignment.