A Practical Method to Plan Co-Evolution of Business and Information Technology

In our fast-changing digital world, Business-IT alignment is not about reaching an end state where business and IT are aligned but about continuously adapting both IT and business to remain aligned with each other. Currently, managerial instruments for doing so are lacking or disconnected. We aim to provide a light-weight and easy-to-use managerial tool for regular re-alignment and co-evolution of organisational goals and software assets for technical and business-oriented stakeholders. Using a Design Science Research approach, we designed our planning method by conducting exploratory interviews to establish its requirements, reviewing pre-existing instruments, expanding upon them, and integrating them into a single planning process. As a result, we created a 5-step method for collaboratively creating, sharing, and monitoring so-called “evolution plans” and evaluated it in an educational pilot and through confirmatory expert interviews. Our method contributes to emerging research that complements established theoretical models of business-IT alignment with its practical operationalisation.