Paper Title
Analyzing The Level of Business – It Strategic Alignment Maturity in Indian Software Companies and Global Benchmarking

Abstract
According to the IT trend survey conducted by Society of Information Management (SIM) in 2021, alignment of IT with Business is ranked among the top 2in the listof top5most important worrisome IT management issues. Since more than three decades it is been on the management’s radar indicating the importance of Strategic Alignment Maturity. In a rapidly changing global business environment if organization can apply IT in sync with business strategies, then organizations can reap the benefits such as high ROI, performance improvements and can have competitive advantages. However, in many cases organizations fail with alignment because of different expectations from both IT and business units. Organizations need to address strategic alignment maturity components (e.g., communications, partnership, IT metrics, governance, human resources, and technology scope) to identify the degree of alignment.Rapid changes in IT innovations especially in AI technologies are putting lot of pressure especially on CIO’s in aligning IT goals with business strategy. Gartner research predicts fifty percent of organizations will experience increased collaboration between Business and IT teams by 2022. Results from my previous research have shown that alignment maturity is improving. However, there are reasons why alignment still today continues to be an important issueamong the top executives globally.Achieving alignment requires both IT and business departments to have equal responsibility in how IT should/could be aligned with business goals and how business should/could be aligned with IT goals. Data for this article was collected using Luftman’ssurvey. This article presents the major findings over the past 18 months with the data collected from 12 Indian software companies. 112 executives responded to the survey. Among the 112 respondents 40 were business executives and 72 were IT executives.The results are benchmarked against Luftman’s global data from nearly 230 fortune 1,000 organizations. Analyzing the alignment maturity of Indian software companieshas provided insights on how companies are organizing for global competition today. This article discusses the results of limited number of companies (12 software companies) in assessing the level of IT-business alignment. The major conclusions of this study include: (a) Significant portion of the companies in the data have achieved higher alignment - Level 3or higher on a scale of 1-5. (b) Strategic Maturity Alignment of Indian software companies are higher than that of benchmarked global companies. (c) The results of this study can help IT and business practitioners to further elaborate the maturity components to improve organizational performance.