Exploring the factors essential for achieving harmonious strategic alignment of Business strategy and IT strategy: A case of a UK Forex SME

As modern technologies are becoming more and more sophisticated, the modern business environment is becoming increasingly competitive. Businesses nowadays have access to an extensive scale of data, and they can make more informed decisions than ever before. This has made the modern business environment excruciatingly competitive and businesses that operate in the traditional way can no longer survive, particularly in industries such as Foreign Exchange (Forex). This is because the companies in the Forex industry utilise cutting edge technologies in their business processes and achieving cross-department strategic alignment is critical to the success of a Forex firm. A wide number of existing studies investigated the factors of strategic alignment in the context of big companies, however, an extensive review of the literature indicated that no empirical research previously investigated Forex SMEs to explore the factors of strategic alignment as well as the challenges SMEs face whilst achieving strategic alignment. This research, therefore, seeks to fill the existing knowledge gap by exploring the critical success factors that are essential for achieving harmonious strategic alignment between business strategy and IT strategy by investigating a UK-based Forex SME as a case. This research adopted the interpretivist research philosophy and utilised a qualitative research design by interviewing 16 participants that are currently working in various departments of the case organisation. In order to analyse the research data, thematic analysis was conducted whilst utilising NVivo 12 pro. This research revealed that factors such as Communication maturity, Competency maturity, IT governance maturity, Scope and architecture of the IT maturity, Partnership maturity, Skills maturity, and Web systems maturity play critical roles in terms of achieving strategic alignment in Forex SMEs. Besides, this research also revealed numerous challenges Forex SMEs face whilst achieving strategic alignment. They include lack of senior management commitment, lack of coordination between departments, resistance to change culture, and slow decisionmaking. The findings of this research make significant contributions to the literature by reconceptualising the existing Luftman’s strategic alignment maturity model in the context of Forex SMEs. The findings also make contributions to the literature by adding new insights and filling the existing knowledge gap.