The role of stakeholder understanding in aligning IT with business objectives

This article reports a study of senior management experience and their opinions on the issues of effective stakeholder communication and the evolving understanding between business and IT. In particular, we explore the impact of modern business context and practices, the issues of trust, nomenclature and the main barriers to the mutual stakeholder understanding. We find that a lack of communication and a lack of understanding between stakeholders impacts negatively on good alignment as manifested by scope creep, the desire to outsource and a lack of trust