The Alignment Between Business & IT And Its Role In Competitive Advantage

Ever since the 20th century, information technology (IT) has influenced human society deeply, which makes the effective application and management of IT become one of the most important tasks faced by enterprises' managers. "Information times" has come. One of the mainly features of information times is the mutual penetration and alignment between business and IT, which generates far-reaching enlightenment for management. Based on this background, through deep study on business and technology, this paper aims to provide some guides and suggestions for enterprises to better make use of information technology.Firstly, this paper make a review of the studies on alignment both home and abroad, based on which detailed and overall definitions of alignment and alignment degree are presented. Then, the alignment model between business and IT is established, with a reference to previous alignment model, theories and methods. In this model, there are two dimensions, namely rational dimension and social dimension. Through careful analyses of this model, this paper extracts some indicators reflecting enterprises' alignment degree, and proposes relative assumptions concerning alignment and competitive advantages. And then, according to competitive advantage analytical model based on enterprises resources theory, this paper analyses the relationship between alignment and competitive advantage quantitatively, reaching first conclusion. Finally, in order to overcome the subjectivity and one-sidedness of qualitative analyses, and to make further quantitative analyses of the relationship between alignment and competitive advantage, this paper employs questionnaire survey to obtain direct data and the structure equation model to deal with data, which leads to the final conclusion.The study results of this paper are mainly as following: (1) definitely proposing the definitions of alignment and alignment degree, establishing alignment model between business and IT from the rational dimension and social dimension, and reflecting the contents and operation mechanism of alignment completely; (2) building up the appraisal indicators of business affair and alignment degree; (3) analyzing the relationship between alignment degree and competitive qualitatively and quantitatively, distinguishing the factors that are able to enhance the alignment degree between business and IT, strengthen enterprises' competitive ability, and make construction to enterprises' informationization.