Sharing a Vision: comparing business and IS managers' perceptions of strategic alignment issues

This paper compares the perceptions of business and IS managers regarding the issues known to affect the achievement of alignment of IS with the business.Previous work has identified Information Systems (IS) managers' organisational position, IS business partnerships, and IS managers' understanding of business respectively, as being critical to attaining IS alignment.On these issues, the findings of this research are encouraging, and suggest that progress has been made in the past fifteen years.The paper's main contribution is in identifying a new focus for alignment researchthe exploration of three, interrelated issues: the extent to which business and IS managers share a vision of the alignment profile of information systems, the extent to which they have a common understanding of the time lags required to achieve such alignment; and the need to educate business managers regarding the strategic potential of IS.