Aligning IS to organization's strategy: the INSTAL method

Aligning Information Systems (IS) to organization's strategic business objectives is one of organizations' top preoccupations. Misalignment is considered as a reason of IT's failure to improve organizational performance. If strategic alignment is relatively simple to understand, it is not so easy to implement. Our experience showed us that organizations are not really able to systematically evaluate whether there is alignment, mainly because of the lack of documentation on strategic alignment. This paper intends to deal with this issue by proposing an approach to describe organizations' strategic objectives and its IS, in order to document and analyze strategic alignment, i.e. how the IS contributes to strategic objectives satisfaction. The proposed method, called INSTAL (Intentional Strategic Alignment), reuses organization documents as a basis to formalize strategic alignment. INSTAL was created following the principles of an action research approach, which consists in developing the approach while exploring issues raised by the case study.