The Impact of National Cultures on Business and IT Alignment

This paper presents a conceptual exploration of the impact of national cultures on the maturity of Business IT Alignment.

The paper relies on Hofstede’s framework of cultural dimensions (Hofstede, 1980) to understand the concept of culture. We present a compact literature review on the influence of culture on IT that leads to the conclusion that there is an influence and that it is likely that also alignment of business and IT will be affected by cultural aspects. After a brief introduction we analyze this influence by conceptually assessing the potential impact of Hofstede’s cultural dimensions on the variables of BIA maturity.