Title: The application of strategic alignment in a fuzzy environment: a case study in banking

Authors: Ayfer Basar

Addresses: Industrial Engineering Department, Istanbul Technical University, Macka Campus 34357, Istanbul, Turkey

Abstract: As a natural consequence of rapid changes and high competition, companies have to determine right business and information technology (IT) strategies consistently to accomplish business value and IT flexibility. They also need to align their strategies and develop an appropriate roadmap in today's competitive environment. This study presents a new methodology to meet the banks' strategic alignment problem which can be defined hierarchically and solved in a top-down structure. For this aim, a method of aligning first business and IT strategies; then IT strategies and domains is proposed depending on the customer expectations and technological improvements. Expert judgments are collected in pairwise comparison with hesitant fuzzy linguistic term sets (HFLTS) for aligning and relatively weighting strategies and service domains. Proposed methodology is applied in a technology company of a big Turkish national bank. The results are approved by experts working as strategic managers in banks and technology companies.

Keywords: strategic alignment; banking; information technology; pairwise comparison; HFLTS.

DOI: 10.1504/IJIDS.2021.113595

International Journal of Information and Decision Sciences, 2021 Vol.13 No.1, pp.70 - 84

Received: 21 Mar 2019
Accepted: 28 May 2019

Published online: 15 Mar 2021 *

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