A Cross industry Evaluation of Critical Success Factors for Alignment of Strategy and Business Processes : A case study of SMEs in the region of Jönköping in Sweden

• The challenges in the global economy have forced companies to rethink the way they operate and their relations with both customers and subcontractors. To remain competitive, companies need to align their business processes with the firm’s strategy and make a strategic use of information technology. This paper addresses one of the important issues in business process management field as well as strategic alignment that is, how do we create and sustain alignment between business processes and strategy? A literature review has been performed by the authors in order to come up with the challenges and critical success factors in process management and business and IT alignment. The results of that investigation are the basis for developing the approach that is advocated in this paper.  Four case studies have been conducted in the area of Jönköping in order to test the validity of the approach in SMEs.  The results show that SMEs continuously put efforts to maintain alignment between their business processes and strategy by means of Information Technology. They usually consider people, management, IT/IS and organisational culture as most important in order to create alignment between strategy and business processes. Organisational structure and performance measurement tend to be less important.

Nyckelord

Strategy and IT alignment

Business processes

Strategy

Information technology

Business Process Management

SME

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