Digital strategy: Moving beyond the IT-business alignment paradigm

The information systems (IS) field has employed the term alignment to denote the need to functionally align IT strategies with business strategies. The field has treated the two strategies as separate spheres of activity where digital technologies are characterized as discrete technical resources to be coordinated with other organizational and managerial resources and capabilities to create business value. The alignment paradigm originated in the 1980s and has undergone significant evolution as digital technologies have advanced in a rapid pace providing new leverage points to create value. In this commentary we argue for a novel strategy paradigm, which frames the digital technology-strategy nexus through the ontological lens of digital objects and how firms in deeply pervasive digital environments create, curate, and recombine digital objects into service stacks and embed them operationally, virtually, and contextually for runtime performance to create value. In this paradigm digital technologies are not separate systems functionally aligned with a “given” strategy. Rather, digital objects arranged into service stacks form a central element in formulating and executing digital strategy because the stacks and supporting infrastructures mediate—not just support—strategy formulation and execution. Service stacks with their dynamic embeddings provide continuous opportunities to create and extract value through an expanding set of leverage points. The commentary calls for revived research on the digital technology-strategy nexus, which intentionally diverges from alignment paradigm opening vistas to engage meaningfully with the question: what is effective digital strategy?