Authors: Andrew Burton-Jones, Carson Woo, Sase N. Singh
Tags: 2008, business-IT alignment, goals, requirements
Business-IT alignment is an important topic in Information Systems (IS) and Requirements Engineering (RE) research. Often IS researchers tend to study it from a strategic, social, and cultural perspective and, RE researches tend to study it from a goal-based perspective. A major assumption of the goal-based perspective is that stakeholders can accurately describe their goals. Several bodies of literature suggest that this assumption is unrealistic in practice because stakeholders’ interpretation of their goals often do not align with the goals assigned to them. Such misalignments in understanding can lead to misalignments between business and IT. In this ongoing research, we explore whether factors such as motivation, experience, and task complexity, which have shown to have an effect on task performance, also have a strong effect on the interpretation of goals that stakeholders provide to system analysts. In this paper, we present a model with three hypotheses to answer our research question, and describe the design and procedures for conducting an experimental study. Our study intends to contribute by providing guidance to systems analysts regarding the appropriate way to elicit requirements from stakeholders and identifying characteristics that affect stakeholders’ understanding of business-IT alignment.
Cite as:
Singh S.N., Burton-Jones A., Woo C. (2008). “Aligning Business-IT Requirements: An Investigation of Factors that Influence the Alignment between Users’ Goals and their Organization’s Goals,” in AIS SIGSAND, Provo, Utah, United States, May 23-24, 2008.
