Business-IT Alignment Research Field

The business-IT alignment has become an important research field that has been widely investigated by different areas and with different viewpoints. Since the interest in the business-IT research field has grown it has become important to monitor how it has been developed and what are the directions of ongoing research within the field. This paper reports the performing of an extensive systematic literature review whose main contribution is to provide an overview of the current status of development and possible further directions for the business-IT alignment research field from the viewpoint covered by six issues: research topics, alignment dimensions, business and IT domains, research goals, types of research results and research methods. The main results indicate that BPM, IT Governance are the two most used research topic, the cultural and social alignment dimensions and the IT strategy domain have been little adopted, there is unnecessary worry about the development of the new approaches rather than taking advantage of the existing ones, the research results are overly theoretical, most of the research is not performing the empirical validity of its results. This paper indicates possible further directions and concluding that the current state of the development of the business-IT research field can still need to gain more maturity.