Business IT Alignment Through a Shared C-Suite Vision for IT

Can the CEO, CFO, CMO, CPO, and the CIO envision the same future for the information technology capability of the organization? Is it possible? Is it necessary? Does it help? The authors present a framework to make this shared vision for IT possible and useful! 

Executive Summary

This article presents a framework for creating a shared vision between an organization’s CIO and its top management team (TMT). Such a vision is the key to aligning the organization’s information systems (IS) strategy with its business strategy. We describe how this shared vision is facilitated by six visioning mechanisms and identify five distinct configurations of visioning mechanisms being used by firms. We label the configurations as: (1) Star, (2) Executive, (3) Confidante, (4) Educator, and (5) Underperformer. CIOs can use these configuration profiles to make tradeoff decisions about which visioning mechanisms to focus on and sustain for a shared CIO-TMT vision for IS strategic alignment. These tradeoffs will take account of CIOs’ personal strengths and their organizational contexts.