How to Use Information Technology Effectively to Achieve Business Objectives - Enterprise Information Systems Design, Implementation and Management: Organizational Applications - page 22

Figure 1. Alignment between business and IT

introduction 2009): administrative automation, rationalization

of means and processes remodelling.
The main challenge of this work consists in
defining frameworks that permit aligning busi-
ness strategies with applications. For such it
was used a modified version of the Hochin Kanri
Matrix where the CRUD table, which allows the
alignment of the business with the Information
Systems, is introduced. At last, to promote the
development of the applications it is proposed the
introduction of some principles that may assure
the success of applications, namely (Reich, B.,
2000): simplify; automate and integrate.
As such, we use an approach to the develop-
ment of applications that enable a continuous and
fast increase in opposition to more complex and
more expensive solutions whose development is
prolonged over the time and represents a major
risk of failure.
These works follow the concepts: what is static
alignment and dynamic alignment between busi-
ness strategy and IT. In the formulation definition
phase, the alignment is made just once and sets
the components of business planning and the IT
components. In the next development phase, the
alignment often occurs by the use of revision
and control of the execution methods of the plan
components defined in the previous phase.

The use made by the IT is recognised as crucial to
the good performance of an organisation (Laudon,
K., & Laudon, J., 2009). Different factors have
been promoting and conditioning the changes on
the IT namely (Spewak, S., 1993), (Henderson,
J. C., & Venkatraman, N., 1993): minor duration
of the company's business cycle; markets glo-
balisation and group activities, competition and
technologies revolution. Pressure for changing
(Figure 1) may occur due to different reasons.
For the new IT to be efficient, their development
must be done in an organised way. The strategy
of change of the IT must be consistent with the
business strategy . This is the only way to justify
the investments on IT (Amor, D, 2001) (Maes,
R., 2000).
The framing of new technologies in the busi-
ness offers great possibilities for the organisations
that are able to benefit from the advantages of their
use but it also means challenge to the IT manage-
ment as the organisations become more dependent
on them and their management specificity. In this
complex scenario, the challenge means to identify
the risks and the benefits that the IT represents to
the organisation targets. In principle aspects, which
are always present, are identified (Lankhorst, M.,