Prioritising and Linking Business and IT Goals in the Financial Sector Wim Van Grembergen, Ph.D. Steven De Haes Hilde Van Brempt University of Antwerp University of Antwerp University of Antwerp Wim.VanGrembergen@ua.ac.be Management School Management School Steven.DeHaes@ua.ac.be Hilde.VanBrempt@ua.ac.be Abstract IT governance and strategic alignment are issues that are high on the agenda in many organisations. To address those challenges, it is important that an organisation has a good view on its business goals and how IT goals and IT processes support the achievement of those goals. This research is aimed at providing guidance in building up such a cascade of business goals, IT goals and IT processes. This research builds on the list of business goals and IT goals, provided in COBIT4.0, and further validates and elaborates this material leveraging the Delphi research method. 1. Introduction Today, IT is more critical to the business than ever (ITGI [7]), moving away from a cost-only factor to a service that is actually contributing in the achievement of the business objectives. Aligning IT to the business, also known as strategic alignment remains one of the major challenges of IT management and business management in general. In IT related literature, amongst the different alignment definitions, a well- perceived view on strategic alignment is “the degree to which the information technology mission, objectives and plans support and are supported by the business mission, objectives and plans” (Chan [3]). In the same article, Chan defines strategic alignment as the fit between the priorities and activities of the IT function and those of the business unit. Numerous articles have been written on strategic alignment and according to different research in this area, there’s still a lot of work ahead for improving the strategic fit between IT and business (Chan [3], Luftman [9], Reich [11]). To address the alignment challenges, it is important for an organisation to have a clear and in-depth view regarding its business goals and how IT goals and IT processes support those goals. Each organization should own clear business goals and a related business strategy, communicated to and adopted by the entire organization. In earlier research on aligning IT and business goals (Van Grembergen et al. [14], Benson [2]) it was confirmed that in practice this is not always the case. Business strategy and goals are not always formally written out and if so, it is not always the case that people throughout the organization are aware of it. Preferably, IT management is involved early in the business strategy definition process, especially in those companies that highly rely on IT, as also promoted by the IT governance framework COBIT 4.0 (Control Objectives for Information and Related Technologies), which states in its control objectives on business – IT alignment: “…Make sure the business direction to which IT is aligned is understood. The business and IT strategies should be integrated, clearly linking enterprise goals and IT goals and recognising opportunities as well as current capability limitations, and broadly communicated. Identify where the business (strategy) is critically dependent on IT and mediate between imperatives of the business and the technology, so agreed priorities can be established.” (ITGI [6]) 2. Research scope The focus of this research is on understanding the relationship between business goals, IT goals and IT processes, as illustrated in Figure 1. In achieving strategic alignment, it is important to clearly understand business and IT goals and to identify priorities and relationships. The defined IT goals in turn can be translated into more detailed IT processes, supporting IT goals and by extent business goals. A scan through literature learns that, although this subject is practical relevant, not a lot of research has been executed in this domain. It is therefore clear that a more thorough research of this cascade is needed. In order to gain a better understanding of the cascade of business goals, IT goals and IT processes, a pilot study (Van Grembergen et al. [14]) was conducted where eight industries were analysed. In- Proceedings of the 40th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences - 2007 1 © 1530-1605/07 $20.00 2007 IEEE Proceedings of the 40th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS'07) 0-7695-2755-8/07 $20.00 © 2007