The Relevance of IT Service Management Maturity for IT Alignment and Its Strategy and Organization Size Contingencies

The paradigm to manage information technology (IT) services in accordance with widely accepted ‘good practices’ has led to the widespread adoption of IT Service Management (ITSM) frameworks such as the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL). Little academic research, however, has been conducted to address whether and in which contingent contexts the institutionalization of ITSM frameworks, understood as collections of IT governance mechanisms, may contribute to IT alignment, a widely recognized prerequisite for superior IT performance. This workshop contribution is based on a cross-sectional survey with ITSM experts in which we measure levels of maturity of different ITSM planning and execution processes and focus on the organizations’ IS strategy (innovative versus conservative) as well as organization size as contingency factors hypothesized to moderate the effect of ITSM maturity on IT alignment. Our findings strengthen the view that ITSM frameworks like ITIL incorporate governance mechanisms that can enhance the effect of the established relational antecedents of IT alignment. In addition, our data particularly provide evidence for the relevance of execution-level ITSM processes and suggest that ITSM practices entail an even greater potential for smaller organizations as well as for those with more conservative IS strategies. Implications for research and practice are discussed.