Capturing Co-evolutionary Information Systems Alignment : Conceptualization and Scale Development

Co-evolutionary approaches to business-IT alignment, such as Co-evolutionary information systems alignment (COISA), have gained attention from scholars and practitioners over the last decade. COISA is an organizational capability defined as continuously exercised alignment competencies, characterized by co-evolutionary interactions between heterogeneous IS stakeholders, in pursuit of a common interpretation and implementation of what it means to apply IT in an appropriate and timely way. In spite of some conceptual and empirical work on COISA, a validated operationalization for empirical measurements for science and practice is not available in the extant literature. We developed a measurement scale through acknowledged procedures, entailing a multivariate structural model consisting of specific facilitators leading to effective alignment competencies. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to propose such a scale.