Aligning Enterprise Systems Capabilities with Business Strategy: An extension of the Strategic Alignment Model (SAM) using Enterprise Architecture.

Abstract In the last decade, Enterprise Architecture (EA) has been proposed to have the potential to improve and support strategic alignment between business and IT. This paper reviews the literature on cross-domain strategic alignment, as well as on Enterprise Architecture, and presents a new model to depict strategic alignment between business and IT by augmenting the widely cited Strategic Alignment Model (SAM) with an Enterprise Architecture framework, The Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF). The contribution of this paper is that it intends to present a holistic, generic model by synthesizing the SAM with the constructs of TOGAF to present a more comprehensive technique of modelling strategic alignment of business and IT. Also, the model illustrates this using Enterprise Systems as the chosen IT platform. Subsequently, the proposed model will be tested using empirical data from case studies and the results will be presented in another paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]