Cause–Effect Analysis for Multiple Misalignment Symptoms in Misalignment Correction Stage

The issue of business and IT alignment (BITA) persists a top concern of researchers and practitioners alike. BITA has not been achieved yet due to dynamic changes in environments and organizations. This paper argues that the misalignment analysis of business and IT, which involves continuously misalignment detection, correction, and prevention, is effective to deal with the dynamics in BITA. The extant research largely pertains to misalignment detection stage. We take one step further and mainly discuss misalignment correction in this paper. A misalignment correction framework is proposed. Within this framework, we especially analyze the cause and effect relationships of the multiple misalignment symptoms proposed by Ori. This framework is beneficial for conducting root-cause analysis and introducing effective mechanisms in the process of BITA.