Enhancing strategic IT alignment through common language: Using the terminology of the resource-based view or the capability-based view?

Despite all the studies on alignment in the past 30 years, alignment is still CIOs’ top concern, denoting the lack of prescriptive studies on antecedents of alignment. Particularly, shared language between CIO and top management team is one of the most important yet neglected antecedent of alignment. While previous studies suggest CIOs avoid technical language and use business terminologies, they do not provide further details. The purpose of this study is to prescribe guidance for CIOs regarding the terminologies that should be used in a conversation with the top management team. Leveraging the literature on strategic management, we suggest CIOs apply the nomenclature of theories of Resource-based View or Capability-base View instead of technical jargons. Moreover, using the Semantic Memory Theory, we hypothesized that applying the nomenclature of Capability-based View results in higher top managers’ understanding of the role of IT. An experiment is suggested to evaluate the hypotheses.