Objective and main results

This article examines the IT alignment process in an organization that augments its pure business-to-business model with an Internet-based business-to-consumer digital strategy. It seeks to answer the question of how the aligning process unfolds through organizational actions in a digital strategy context.

Main findings:

• Aligning is a continual, ongoing process, and the authors present three major phases of iterative aligning: Exploratory, building, and extending.
• Three broad categories of aligning actions were identified that occurred throughout the aligning process, albeit in different proportions: Sensing, seizing and transforming.
• While necessary for aligning, the actions undertaken to achieve alignment also highlight misalignments between the emergent strategy and existing resources and give rise to tensions that need to be addressed.

Summary of practical implications

It is paramount that the top management communicate a clear strategy to the entire organization. If this is lacking, tensions may arise between managers in the digital unit and existing functional department members.

Creating a new department may be necessary to run and coordinate the digitalization work. According to the authors, there must be a willingness to make necessary investments in dedicated resources - creating a new dedicated team that can coordinate and exploit both internal (cross-departmental) and external resources, may be instrumental to successful alignment.

It is important to have a clear focus on integrating the new and existing business. Being able to leverage an existing business for the new business may result in higher acceptance of the new (digital) business. It is important to have new and dedicated resources (e.g. in the digital department) to tie the new and existing business together and make them mutually reinforcing.

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