CIO#1-1: Strategic Alignment Model
Welcome to the course IS Strategy at Tilburg University. This is the first lecture of this course. It addresses the role of chief information officers in organizations. This lecture tries to answer the problem raised in Chapter 1 of the textbook. In this chapter, Jim Barton, a successful business manager with no background in IT is offered the role of CIO by the new CEO. He wonders what a CIO does and what responsibilities a CIO holds. My answer is that the main role of a CIO is aligning IT with business. I use several highly-cited information system journal papers and books to describe IT-business alignment. At the end of this lecture, you can describe business strategy, IT strategy, business operation, and IT operation. You learn that IT-business alignment is aligning these four dimensions. You can describe these various alignment types and categorize a CIO's challenge under one of these alignment types.
Source: Henderson, J. C., & Venkatraman, H. (1999). Strategic alignment: Leveraging information technology for transforming organizations. IBM systems journal, 38(2.3), 472-484.