"Iterate Wildly": Is User-Centred Design and Prototyping the Key to Strategic Alignment?

Abstract

The topic of IT alignment to various forms of organizational strategy and operations continues to be a top concern among both IS practitioners and academics. The overall historical discourse is that organizations have two options regarding alignment: 1) develop a set strategy and enforce it through a top-down focus via some governance mechanism(s), or 2) accomplish it via patchy evolutionary processes. Claudio Ciborra argued that the former model fails to recognize the realities of such change, offering many new tracks for alignment research positioned in the latter that have been ignored for many years. However, the Australian government is now implementing many aspects of these tracks as the strategy itself, directing organizations to reverse focus to users and prototyping rather than executives and waterfalling. As we will illustrate, alignment might be better achieved not through rigid control and governance, but through increased focus on micro-level needs, local-level ownership, and coevolutionary moves over time. By focusing on the dynamic between Australia’s Digital Transformation Office and the Department of Employment, this research in progress paper answers calls to refocus on the everyday practices and activities in which various actors appear to become aligned through coevolutionary socio-technical practices