Paper Title
Analyzing The Level of It-Business Strategic Alignment Maturity in Retail Industries and Global Benchmarking

Abstract
According to the IT trend survey conducted by Society of Information Management (SIM) in 2020 alignment of IT with Business is ranked among the top 3in the listof Top 10 IT management concernssince 2010 indicating the importance of Strategic Alignment Maturity. Aligning IT and business objectives continues to be an important strategic initiative for organizations around the world. Organizations need to address strategic alignment maturity components (e.g., communications, partnership, IT metrics, governance, human resources, and technology scope) (Kempaiah 2018). In order to gain competitive advantage as organizations continue to expand investing in new AI technologies such as machine learning and deep learning, alignmentbetween IT and businessappears to be an important issue. Gartner research predicts fifty percent of organizations will experience increased collaboration between Business and IT teams by 2022. Results from the previous research by Luftman and Kempaiah shows that alignment maturity is dynamic and continually evolving, there are reasons why alignment still even today continues to be an important issue globally.Achieving alignment requires IT staff to have sufficient business understanding of their core operations and business staff to have sufficient understanding of technical knowledge of IT solutions used in their organizations (Kempaiah, 2011). The article will leverage the concepts of strategic alignment maturity using Luftman’s model in the context of retail companies toidentify the current-state of IT-business alignment. Analyzing the alignment maturity of retail companies has provided significant insights on how retail companies are organizing for global competition today. This article presents the major findings based on surveys received from130 executives from retail companies and isbenchmarked against the Luftman’s global data from 231 Fortune 1,000 organizations. The major findings include: (a) Most retail companies are at Level 3on a scale of 1-5and most companies around the world are also still at Level 2 or Level 3. (b) Strategic Maturity Alignment of retail companies are almost at the same level as that of benchmarked global companies. (c) Clearly demonstrates that there are differences in the perception of Strategic Alignment Maturity between IT and business executives. Kempaiah, R (2011). Global Analysis and Benchmarking SAM in IT Service Industry – 18th Annual South Dakota International Business Conference, Rapid City, SD. September 29- October 01, 2011. Kempaiah, R. (2018). The Current State of IT-Business Alignment: Analysis and Global Benchmarking – International Conference on Management, Economics and Social Science - ICMESS in Paris, France March 12-13, 2018.