Information and Knowledge Management www.iiste.org ISSN 2224-5758 (Paper) ISSN 2224-896X (Online) Vol.6, No.2, 2016 81 Information Systems Strategic Alignment Maturity Levels: Corporate and Project Implementation Perspectives Dr. Kiyeng P. Chumo, Directorate of ICT, Moi University, Kenya Abstract Deriving value from Information Systems (IS) investments has been a great concern in most organizations. IS strategic alignment also known as Business-IS alignment has been argued as one of the approaches of achieving IS investment value. Various researchers have proposed approaches to understanding the importance, achievement and maintenance of strategic alignment in organizations. This research used a strategic alignment assessment framework derived from Luftman’s Strategic Alignment Maturity Model (SAMM) to establish alignment maturity levels of public universities in Kenya. The approach adopted considers both Corporate (decision making) level and Project (IS implementation) level in evaluating strategic alignment maturity of an organization. Survey questionnaires were used in data collection and quantitative data analysis was employed. The study found out that the alignment maturity scores was higher at IS project implementation level as compared to corporate level. There was also consistency in alignment maturity scores ranking of factors in the two levels with communication and partnership scoring high at both levels while the human resource skills were ranked lowest at both levels. Keywords: Strategic alignment, Information Systems Investments, Strategic Alignment Maturity Model (SAMM), IS project implementation 1.0 Introduction Information Systems (IS) investments have become one of the main items in organizations investment portfolio. To achieve value from the investments in information systems, it is important to ensure that IS strategies and business strategies are aligned. This process is known as Business-IS alignment or Strategic Alignment. For several decades strategic alignment has been one of the top management concerns of most organizations (Luftman, 2005). IS strategies and business strategies do not independently enable organizations to realize performance improvement, but it is the strategic alignment of the two (Henderson and Venkatraman, 1999; Luftman & Kempiah, 2007). While it is generally accepted that information systems affects organization’s performance and distinctiveness, different organizations in different sectors exhibit different outcome despite similar investments in IS (Dhar and Sundararajan, 2006). The varied impact is attributed to assumption that IS impacts on an organization’s performance by enhancing processes and that the level of impact will depend on the organization’s internal characteristics including skills, infrastructure and corporate culture which vary across different organizations and also the external competitive environment which the organization operate. Most of the earlier researches considered strategic alignment assessment at the corporate level which does not give a complete picture of the entire organization strategic alignment performance. Strategic alignment process focus should be extended from corporate level where decisions are made to project level by focusing on the process of achieving alignment at the project implementation. Project alignment requires corporate strategic alignment as a starting point and corporate strategic alignment is facilitated by project alignment to successfully implement the organization’s alignment strategy. Therefore, the two types of alignment are tightly connected (Jenkin & Chan, 2009). IS alignment leads to more focused and strategic use of information system resources which in turn results to increased performance (Chan, 2002). It is therefore important to understand alignment at both project implementation level and corporate level in order to understand the overall organization Business-IS alignment. Strategic alignment has positive impacts to IS project success and organizational performance and therefore continuous failure of IS projects and hence lack of realization of benefits from investments in IS implies lack of strategic alignment (Clarke, 2002). Aligning project implementation and management to business strategy is important in achieving organization’s strategic objectives. However, there are challenges because objectives of corporate strategy are not always well communicated and consistent with the project implementation. This results in the implementation of projects which are not consistent with the original organizational strategies formulated by the executives at the corporate level without involvement of the project managers at the tactical and operational level.