Information Technology Reference
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Government Accountability Office (GAO). The key areas of management concern
in aligning strategy and ICT highlighted the following areas for improvement:
needing better management in order to achieve significant savings, establishing and
implementing incremental development policies, refining ICT investment manage-
ment processes to improve reliability and transparency, anticipating and meeting
accountability challenges, overcoming limitations in management controls and
human capital planning to support modernization efforts, overcoming information
exchange challenges resulting from the lack of specific prioritized actions, leveraging
best practices to ensure the success of major acquisitions, improving project manage-
ment practices, developing strategic capabilities to improve interactive services, and
needing strengthened oversight to improve overall performance and control. These
issues offer only a flavor of the types of challenges that public organizations face in
aligning strategy and ICT today. Further insight into these issues and more can be
explored by directly accessing the GAO website (http://gao.gov).
Nearly all state and local governments now formulate strategic ICT plans.
However, such plans lack transparency and responsiveness (Yang & Melitski,
2007). According to Sommer (2002), many governmental ICT projects fail.
Furthermore, ICT projects classified as e-government initiatives are considered to
be unsophisticated and nontransactional, and only few governments can attribute
major transformational change to the successful execution of ICT (Coursey &
Norris, 2008). To better understand ICT failure in public organizations, one way
of doing this is to reflect on the outcomes associated with strategic ICT initia-
tives (Bloch, Blumberg, & Laartz, 2012; Nelson, 2007). The level of total suc-
cess for ICT initiatives based on planned outcomes is posited to be as low as 10%
(McDonagh & Coghlan, 2006, 2010). A further 20% of initiatives are delivered
in full but fall far outside the range of planned investment cost, functionality, and
scheduled delivery time (McDonagh & Coghlan, 2006, 2010). An additional 20%
of initiatives fall short in that fulfillment results in only 50% of the functionality, at
twice the planned level of investment and scheduled delivery time (McDonagh &
Coghlan, 2006, 2010). Finally, the remaining 50% fail to deliver anything of value
and accomplish nothing more than consuming scarce public resources in pursuit
of failed ICT programs and projects (Loonam, McDonagh, Kumar, & O'Regan,
2014; McDonagh & Coghlan, 2006, 2010).
7.5 empirical inquiry into Strategic Alignment
The study of the strategic alignment construct has been dominated by research
that examined mostly its relevance and meaning to private sector organizations.
The distinction between public and private sectors can be described as the con-
strained generalizability of findings. However, a small number of empirical stud-
ies (approximately 10%) have, in contrast, taken a particular interest in exploring
the relevance and performance of strategic alignment in the public sector (Caffrey,
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