Importance of the alignment of IT and business resources in financial processes - An empirical study

How do firms realize business value from deploying IT in business processes? Based on the Resource-based View and insights from recent literature on IT/business alignment, we argue the actual usage and the alignment if IT and business units are important prerequisities for a superior performance of IT-intensive business processes. In this paper, a causal model on the joint impact of IT usage, IT/business alignment and business resources on business process performance is proposed and empirically validated using data from Germany's 1,000 largest banks. It turns out that the, perceived performance at the focal business process, as predicted in the theoretical model, strongly depends on IT/business alignment. The empirical analysis also shows that business resources have a large impact and that even a superior IT cannot compensate business resource deficiencies. The results thereby provide support for important propositions of the literature on alignment from a process perspective and contribute to common knowledge that should not be assessed without evaluating and controlling for business resources as a complementary factor.