Validating a Practical Method for Planning Co-Evolution of Business and

IT in a Public Sector Organisation

Christof Meekers

1 a

, Sara Nodehi

1 b

, Tim Huygh

1 c

, Laury Bollen

1 d

and Joost Visser

2 e

Information Science, Open University, Heerlen, The Netherlands

LIACS, Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands

Keywords:

Business-IT Alignment, Planning Method, Field Experimentation, Public Sector.

Abstract:

Background Business-IT alignment (BITA) remains a top management concern. A method for business-

driven planning of changes in information systems was proposed by Nodehi et al., and evaluated in a limited

way through an educational pilot and expert interviews. Aim We want to evaluate the proposed method in

the public sector and identify possible improvements. Method We conducted a case study, involving four

evolution projects in a local government organisation. We identiﬁed BITA challenges in the case organisation,

then moderated the application of the method by participants, and ﬁnally studied the usefulness of the method

through surveys and interviews. Results We identiﬁed 14 categories of BITA challenges in our public sector

case organisation that largely match the challenges identiﬁed by Nodeehi et al. in the private sector. Overall,

the method was well-accepted and highly appreciated by all participants. Several improvement points were

identiﬁed. Clear links were found between identiﬁed BITA challenges and speciﬁc elements of the method.

Conclusion The proposed planning method was found to be beneﬁcial for improving BITA in the public

sector. Additionally, the links found between BITA challenges and method elements provide insight in how

the method helps achieve alignment.

1 INTRODUCTION

The importance of aligning business and IT and the

critical impact of such alignment on company per-

formance is well known and has been subject of ex-

tensive research (Luftman et al., 2008; Renaud et al.,

2016). Still, aligning IT with the business ranks as

n°1 or n°2 issue in IT management in recent years,

as reported in the yearly IT Issues and Trends study

of the Society for Information Management (Kappel-

man et al., 2022; Johnson et al., 2023).

While some research has been conducted on how

organisations have achieved alignment, a lack re-

mains of operational tools or actionable results (Sun-

doro and Wandebori, 2021). To help close this gap,

Nodehi et al. (2023) recently developed a lightweight

method for planning the medium to long-term evolu-

https://orcid.org/0009-0005-0975-3337

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2919-1336

https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4564-7994

https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6475-7561

https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0158-3095

tion of digital assets. In this method, high-level evo-

lution steps are driven by business goals. By bring-

ing different stakeholders together, the method stim-

ulates collaboration and collective commitment, en-

ables rapid adaptation to possible changes during a

project, and considers a broad range of relevant fac-

tors when planning a project, which helps improve co-

ordination between business units. By providing in-

sight and foresight into digital assets or projects, this

method also enables business and IT to collaborate on

achieving common goals.

To date, the validation of the method proposed

by Nodehi et al. (2023) is limited, involving pilots

in an educational setting and expert interviews with

practitioners, but no ﬁeld experiments have been con-

cluded so far. In fact, Nodehi et al. (2023) call for

future work to validate their method in practice.

Therefore, to test the method’s applicability in the

real world, we have started to conduct case studies

in various organisations. In the current paper, we re-

port on a completed case study within a public sec-

tor organisation. In particular, we have applied the

method in four BITA planning projects in a Flemish

Meekers, C., Nodehi, S., Huygh, T., Bollen, L. and Visser, J.

Validating a Practical Method for Planning Co-Evolution of Business and IT in a Public Sector Organisation.

DOI: 10.5220/0012629600003690

Paper published under CC license (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

In Proceedings of the 26th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems (ICEIS 2024) - Volume 2, pages 569-580

ISBN: 978-989-758-692-7; ISSN: 2184-4992

569

local government setting. Our objective is to answer

the following main research question: Is the proposed

method useful for improving BITA in public sector or-

ganisations?

In Section 2, we discuss background and related

work. In Section 3, we outline our approach for evalu-

ating the proposed method. In Section 4 we report the

evaluation results. In Section 5, we discuss the inter-

pretation, limitations and relevance of our results, and

we conclude the paper in Section 6 with a summary

of our contributions and avenues for future work.

2 BACKGROUND AND RELATED

WORK

Proposed Method. In “A Practical Method to Plan

Co-Evolution of Business and Information Technol-

ogy”, Nodehi et al. (2023) propose a method for plan-

ning changes to information systems, driven by busi-

ness goals. They provide both the process steps for

the planning method and a template for the deliver-

able, called an evolution plan. A schematic overview

of their method is reproduced in Figure 1. The

components of an evolution plan include an analy-

sis of the current situation, a concise statement of

a (business-driven) ambition, a series of high-level

evolution steps, called design moves, and ﬁnally a

roadmap in which these steps are placed on a time-

line. Important activities in the evolution planning

process include stakeholder analysis, SWOT analysis,

deﬁnition of actions, success criteria, and assessment

of risks. Online support materials for the method in-

clude a multi-tab data collection spreadsheet that sup-

ports tracking of information and decisions through-

out the process steps. As noted by the authors, vali-

dation of the method in ﬁeld experiments is lacking.

Validation of BITA Models. Models for measur-

ing or improving Business-IT alignment that are pro-

posed in literature have rarely been submitted to

proper validation in ﬁeld studies.

Kotusev (2020) proposes a pipeline of decision-

making phases to operationalise the improvement of

Business-IT alignment: positioning, focusing, prior-

itizing, assessing, and implementing. This proposal

has similar objectives as the method of Nodehi et al.

(2023), and also lacks validation.

Ullah and Lai (2011) propose an approach to align

business goals with requirements elicitation. This ap-

proach was successfully implemented and tested at an

automobile company on a business process for man-

aging customer orders. Validation on more than a sin-

gle business process is lacking.

Tapia et al. (2007) use focus groups and case stud-

ies for validation of the business-IT alignment criteria

in the Value-based Business-IT Alignment Maturity

Model (VITALMM) proposed by Tapia (2006). The

validation was limited to the criteria and did not cover

the model in its entirety. Combining focus group ﬁnd-

ings with ﬁndings from a case study helped identify

reﬁnement actions more comprehensively.

A conceptual Business-IT alignment model is pre-

sented by Trienekens et al. (2013) based on ﬁve align-

ment factors: ”Intention and Support, Working Re-

lationships, Shared Domain Knowledge, IT Projects

and Planning, and IT Performance”. In order to val-

idate the alignment factor measurement model, ﬁve

organisations in the Dutch ﬁnancial sector were stud-

ied. The underlying model has not been generalized

beyond this case study.

BITA in the Public Sector. As Winkler (2013) points

out, little attention has been given to the idiosyn-

crasies of IT governance mechanisms in the public

sector. Using existing literature, he proposes a con-

ceptual model that identiﬁes structural, procedural,

and relational mechanisms that contribute to a (novel)

construct of Administration-IT alignment and vali-

dates this model in three comparative cases. The

study suggests that structural and relational mecha-

nisms are important to achieving alignment between

administration departments and IT units, while proce-

dural mechanisms are not clearly inﬂuential.

Tapia et al. (2008) conducted an empirical study

exploring business-IT alignment processes in a net-

worked organisation, including the province Overijs-

sel, the municipalities of Zwolle and Enschede, and

the water board district Regge & Dinkel and Royal

Grolsch N.V. in The Netherlands. Although the case

study revealed signiﬁcant ﬁndings the authors believe

that the generalisability of such ﬁndings is only pos-

sible with replication.

3 APPROACH

To validate the method of Nodehi et al. (2023) in the

ﬁeld, we have conducted a case study in a public sec-

tor organisation. In the public sector, BITA is an im-

portant management issue, just as in the private sector,

but it may come with speciﬁc challenges. While pub-

lic sector organisations are moving from digitalization

to digital transformation, they must adapt and become

more agile in order to deliver digital services, requir-

ing fundamental and disruptive changes in their oper-

ations (Janssen and Van Der Voort, 2016). Meeting

this challenge is particularly difﬁcult because public

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Figure 1: Schematic overview of the co-evolution planning method, reproduced from Nodehi et al. (2023).

sector organisations often are bureaucratic and inﬂex-

ible, relying on hierarchical organisational structures

(Ylinen, 2021).

The case organisation is a Flemish local govern-

ment organisation, employing about 390 people to

serve a community of about 34000 inhabitants. The

ﬁrst author was employed there as a Manager of ICT

& Digital Information.

The case study was conducted by selecting four

change initiatives with substantial IT components.

For each of these initiatives, a planning team was

formed that applied the planning method to collabo-

ratively draft an evolution plan. The planning process

was facilitated by the ﬁrst author.

Data collection for the validation was performed

through document review, interviews, focus groups,

meeting observation, and questionnaires. Triangula-

tion (Yin, 2018) was achieved by combining these

various sources of evidence.

Participant selection was determined by their role

in the organisation and their involvement in the

change initiatives (projects). In addition to mem-

bers of the projects, two additional top-level man-

agers were interviewed. Participants were informed

of the purpose of the study beforehand and given the

opportunity to consent to recording, anonymisation,

and transcription of their interviews. Survey data was

anonymised.

Several different kinds of interviews were con-

ducted. Each semi-structured interview was guided

by a predeﬁned list of key themes or concepts and key

questions related to these themes. Using theoretically

derived themes consistently in each interview led to

comparable and valid data (Saunders et al., 2009).

One-to-many interviews with members of the project

team were also conducted in order to explore spe-

ciﬁc aspects regarding the method used in practice. In

these focus groups, multiple participants explored the

predetermined topic with the ﬁrst author’s role being

to facilitate discussion among participants (Saunders

et al., 2009).

We used four surveys in addition to focus groups

to collect standardized data from a variety of partici-

pants for comparison (Saunders et al., 2009). The sur-

vey questionnaires were structured around the factors

of the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), follow-

ing Riemenschneider et al. (2002): ease of use of the

method, compatibility with current ways of working,

subjective norm (i.e. whether most people approve of

using the method, usefulness of coping with BITA

challenges, and intention to adopt the method. The

survey asked for scoring these TAM criteria on a 5-

point Likert scale, for the constituent parts of the evo-

lution plans as well as the plan as a whole.

In the execution of the study, several phases can

be distinguished as we explain below.

Validating a Practical Method for Planning Co-Evolution of Business and IT in a Public Sector Organisation

571

Phase 1: Initiation of the Study. We started by

gaining insight into the current state of business-IT

alignment in the case organisation and the challenges

faced by IT and business teams. To this end, we

conducted interviews with a broad range of manage-

ment team members (e.g. the general manager, and

ﬁnancial director), managers, and staff from various

departments, thus gathering information from a vari-

ety of perspectives. Insights were gained on both a

strategic and operational level. To formulate inter-

view questions, we gathered information via docu-

ments and archival research. As a result of this phase,

we were able to describe the case organisation’s de-

parture situation. Content analysis on documents and

interview transcripts was performed using ATLAS.ti.

Phase 2: Introduction of the Method. In the sec-

ond phase, focus groups were held for each of the

change initiatives in which the evolution planning

method was going to be applied. In these focus ses-

sions, the ﬁrst author explained the evolution planning

method to the project members in a step-by-step man-

ner. Moreover, as moderator, he stimulated dynamic

discussions and gathered general ﬁrst impressions and

opinions about the evolution planning method and the

resulting evolution plan. The method was then put

into practice by the project members.

Phase 3: Intermediate Evaluation of the Method.

During the period that the project teams were work-

ing on their evolution plans, intermediate evaluation

of the method was organised in the form of three

moderated focus sessions per project. In these ses-

sions, selected elements of the method, such as am-

bition, design moves, or roadmap were evaluated by

the participants. After each focus group, the par-

ticipants were surveyed individually –without inter-

fering with others’ opinions– regarding the possible

strengths, weaknesses, limitations, and opportunities

of these elements. Feedback collected during a focus

group was used by the moderator for stimulating dis-

cussion in subsequent focus groups.

Phase 4: Operational View on the Method. In

this phase, all project members were asked to provide

their ﬁnal feedback regarding the evolution plan’s

contribution to a better alignment of business and IT,

as well as how the method could be improved to make

it better suited to public sector organisations. Mem-

bers of the project were asked to give their opinions

about the evolution plan as a whole, including its

strengths, weaknesses, limitations, or opportunities.

Phase 5: Strategic View on the Method. We

studied the strategic view on the evolution planning

method through interviews with two members of the

management team, who were not part of the project

teams. In addition to discussing the challenges iden-

tiﬁed by the method within the organisation, we also

discussed the results of the projects that implement

the method. As part of the analysis, feedback was

collected on ways in which the evolution plan could

enhance business-IT alignment.

4 RESULTS

Table 1 lists the 15 participants in our study, their

roles, and their involvement in the 4 projects where

the evolution planning method was applied. The plan-

ning teams consisted of 2 to 4 members. Their roles

include various management positions, domain ex-

perts, and IT or application engineers. Interviewing

and moderation of focus groups were done by the ﬁrst

author, who was also an IT manager in the case or-

ganisation. In total, we conducted 11 semi-structured

interviews, moderated 20 focus groups, and surveyed

12 participants with 4 questionnaires covering differ-

ent elements of the method. The case study was car-

ried out between February and June 2023.

4.1 BITA Challenges

To gain insight into the current state of business-IT

alignment and the challenges faced by IT and business

teams, we conducted semi-structured interviews with

9 of our participants (7 project members and 2 top

managers). In this section, we discuss the problem

categories that we identiﬁed.

The Digital Evolution. Employees in the case organ-

isation experience an acceleration in technological de-

velopments in recent years. The organisation does not

consider itself an early adopter, but is a front-runner

compared to other local governments.

Dealing with Strategic New Insights. The organi-

sation feels it lacks a structured process for capturing

new strategic insights or new ideas.

Strategy Formulation: The overall strategy –as for-

mulated in a multi-year plan (MYP) customary for

local governments– has been made available both in-

ternally (intranet) and externally (municipal website).

But while employees are aware of the overall vision

(offering customer-oriented services to its citizens),

the approach to its implementation appears not widely

known or is regarded as not directly applicable to day-

to-day operations.

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Table 1: Study participants. The evolution planning method was applied in 4 projects with a total of 13 participants. Addi-

tionally, two top managers were interviewed.

Project Project members

A: Renew appointment

booking software to boost

employee productivity and

citizen satisfaction

Manager of the department Civil Services (project owner)

IT system engineer (n°1) (project owner)

Domain expert (n°2)

B: Consolidate GIS systems to

broaden access to street

furniture and tree management

functions

GIS coordinator (project owner)

Manager of the department Facility Services (project owner)

C: Enhance system for

service request

management to optimize

service delivery

Vice-general manager (project owner)

Application engineer (project owner)

IT system engineer (n°2) (domain expert)

Domain expert (n°3) (domain expert)

D: Replace legacy

point-of-sales system to

simplify ﬁnancial

administration

Manager of the ﬁnancial department (project owner)

Application engineer (project owner)

Domain expert (n°1) (domain expert)

Financial director (domain expert)

Top management

interviewees

General manager

Manager of the department of spatial planning and development

IT Innovation: While the organisation promotes an

open innovation culture at all levels, in practice, it is

difﬁcult to create time and attention for new develop-

ments. While people want to move away from out-

dated ways of working, they are also busy with day-

to-day operations and are reluctant to change.

Relationship Between Business and IT Teams. An

overall positive feeling prevails within the case or-

ganisation regarding alignment between business and

IT. Nevertheless, alignment sometimes fails when it

comes to cross-departmental projects. Although the

IT department is open to consultation with other de-

partments, it remains difﬁcult for them to understand

the speciﬁc needs of all departments, or to fully un-

derstand the plethora of knowledge domains within

the organisation.

Digital Awareness Within the Organisation. Not

all departments are equally aware of relevant tech-

nologies or technological concepts. While IT has a

responsibility to raise awareness, it does not pursue

this with a structured approach. Business is regularly

inspired by new technology, but also routinely turns

to the IT department to inquire about technical feasi-

bility assistance.

Customisation, Technical Debt and Complexity.

When departments are inspired to pursue innova-

tions, this sometimes results in a great deal of cus-

tomization, making the organisation vulnerable if in-

ternal support is lacking, or an increase in technical

debt (Allman, 2012) and complexity of the software

application.

Central Coordination: Project ownership is unclear

in the organisation, including what project owners are

responsible for and what tasks they should be per-

forming. Although projects (and related budgets) are

part of the MYP, they are not prioritized or centrally

coordinated, making it hard for departments to know

when projects will be launched, when they will run,

or when concrete actions will be taken.

Stakeholder Involvement. The case organisation

has so many different knowledge domains and cor-

responding stakeholders that it is not always apparent

who should be involved in projects. This regularly

leads to stakeholders being involved too late or alto-

gether forgotten, in spite of good intentions.

Current Situation Analysis. Analysis of the situa-

tion at departure differs among projects. In the ab-

sence of a standard analysis approach, after project

initiation, the focus shifts too quickly to speciﬁc prob-

lems, project scope, or ﬁnal goals. As a result, de-

partments experience that projects start under wrong

assumptions and that a number of steps are skipped,

gradually resulting in failure.

Strategy Implementation. Putting the overall strat-

egy into practice involves a lot of ad-hoc approaches

in a local government. In order for the organisation

to deliver added value to its citizens, it must be able

to react quickly to opportunities that arise in society.

The political entities are also very sensitive to this

matter, so the organisation must be agile in imple-

menting its projects and strategy. However, putting

the strategy into practice poses a number of chal-

Validating a Practical Method for Planning Co-Evolution of Business and IT in a Public Sector Organisation

573

lenges, particularly in terms of project scope, asso-

ciated ambition, and potential risks.

Deﬁnition of Clear Goals. A project - at its initia-

tion phase - is always linked to the MYP and there-

fore to a speciﬁc objective or goal. Yet, the added

value of a project is not explicitly stated enough and

is not addressed systematically. Obviously, a project

is only initiated if it will add value to the organisa-

tion, but when it comes to the gaps a particular project

will ﬁll, everyone has ideas about what that project

will accomplish, but it is typically viewed from a de-

partmental standpoint. There is not enough explicit or

written documentation of the added value of a project.

Additionally, this added value should be viewed from

multiple perspectives. A challenge for the organisa-

tion is to obtain a better consensus on the purpose of

projects since stakeholders often don’t or rarely have

that kind of conversation.

Monitoring and Evaluation. The monitoring and

evaluation of projects is another challenge that is not

addressed enough across the organisation. When an

evaluation occurs, it is handled by a department man-

ager who determines whether projects were delivered

on time and on budget, what pain points occurred,

and how these could be avoided in the future. The

IT department also attempts to make that evaluation,

but it is not always easy. Sometimes the objectives

of a project are too fuzzy, so ongoing evaluation and

monitoring are required, for example, when purchas-

ing a software application that is still being devel-

oped. Overall, there is no structured way to evaluate

projects.

Existing Frameworks and Tools. To address the

above-mentioned challenges, the organisation has

been seeking a structural project approach but hasn’t

succeeded. Therefore, the management team set up a

speciﬁc working group that included representatives

of both business and IT to make this a priority. It was

previously attempted to create a project information

sheet that would encourage people to think about a

project’s purpose, its stakeholders, possible pitfalls,

etc., but in practice that document is rarely used.

In short, the case organisation is aware of the im-

portance of alignment, but also experiences alignment

challenges in a range of aspects. Many of these chal-

lenges can be related directly to challenges that were

also identiﬁed by Nodehi et al. (2023) when develop-

ing their evolution planning method.

4.2 Appreciation of the Evolution Plan

We studied the appreciation of the study participants

for the evolution plan as a whole and for its con-

stituent elements both quantitatively and qualitatively.

Quantitative results were obtained through an in-

dividual questionnaire with project members, us-

ing the criteria of the technology acceptance

model (Riemenschneider et al., 2002). We obtained

responses on a 5-point Likert scale for all combina-

tions of TAM criteria, project members, and method

elements or entire method that can be summarized as

follows:

• The average score of 4 (agree) was obtained

across participants, for almost all combinations

of method elements and TAM-criteria. Almost

no difference was observed on these combinations

between managers and other employees.

• For compatibility, average scores were 2 (dis-

agree) or 3 (neutral) for all method elements. For

compatibility, average scores from managers were

consistently (half or entire point) lower than from

other employees.

• For the element design moves, the average score

for ease of use, was 3 (neutral), entirely due to

managers providing lower scores, while the aver-

age from other employees remained at 4 (agree).

• For the element monitoring and evaluation, the

average scores for ease of use and intention to use,

were 3 (neutral), again due to lower scores from

managers rather than from other employees.

• For the evolution plan as a whole, the average

scores for ease of use was 3 (neutral) and for com-

patibility was 2 disagree. For subjective norm,

usefulness, intention to use, the average scores

were 4 (agree). Managers and other employees

scored similarly.

Thus, while the evolution plans and their elements

were for the greater part highly appreciated, its com-

patibility with current ways of working was deemed

low, and design moves and monitoring and evaluation

were regarded by managers as less easy to use.

Qualitative results were obtained through initial

impressions when the planning method was ﬁrst in-

troduced, and in discussions in focus sessions. The

obtained feedback was summarized and categorized

into strengths, weaknesses, limitations, and opportu-

nities. This was done for evolution plans as a whole

and for their constituent elements. These results can

be summarized as follows:

Strengths. The method was found to stimulate dia-

logue and offers insights into stakeholders’ needs. It

forces project teams to think through a project and

document its steps. Additionally, it allows for bet-

ter anticipation and early detection of potential prob-

lems. This approach enables the management to get

a clear overview of the project from the beginning to

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the end, preventing ad-hoc approaches and avoiding

hazardous steps. Through the evolution plan, the goal

of a project can be clearly formulated with the input

of various departments, and a structured approach is

used to plan the project. Project information is care-

fully documented and all important steps are taken

into account to make a project team aware of relevant

topics and allow them to think deeply about them.

Weaknesses. The evolution plan was seen to docu-

ment project data mainly for the strategic underpin-

ning of the project (e.g. for presentation to a manage-

ment team). The template deliverable does not facili-

tate documentation of more detailed technical or func-

tional information, which may also be essential for

starting a project. It is often difﬁcult to ﬂow ﬂuently

through the different steps of the data collection form.

To keep things readable, content needs to be described

very generally. The process is time-consuming, re-

quires certain skills that not everyone has, and was

perceived as too elaborate for smaller projects.

Limitations. The comprehensive nature of the evo-

lution planning method is a strength that may also

be seen as a threat. Teams that are unprepared to

consider a wide range of organisational and techni-

cal aspects (possibly due to insufﬁcient motivation,

mandate, allocated time, or skill diversity) may aban-

don the method and fall back on an ad-hoc approach.

When the method does get applied fully, the roadmap

that is ultimately constructed as part of an evolu-

tion plan may still be (partially) ignored or might

need adjustment during the ensuing project execution.

How to keep the evolution plan, and speciﬁcally the

roadmap, in focus up-to-date during project execution

is not currently addressed by the evolution planning

method.

Opportunities. While designed for planning

business-driven IT change projects, the evolution

planning method could lead to a better overall project

approach within organisations, as well as an over-

all improvement in (interdepartmental) collaboration.

For any type of (sufﬁciently large) project, the method

facilitates reﬂection on the various project phases, al-

lows taking a wider range of stakeholders into consid-

eration. and may lead to more thoroughly substanti-

ated decisions. The concise deliverable enables a pro-

fessional, more standaridzed, and efﬁcient way of pre-

senting project plans to higher management to support

their decision processes in the context of (IT) project

portfolio management and management of (digital)

transformation programs.

Feedback from participants was also collected

about possible adjustments or improvements of the

evolution planning method, the evolution plan tem-

plate, or the data collection spreadsheet. These sug-

gestions are listed in the appendix.

In short, the participants generally agreed with

the ease of use, conformance to subjective norm, and

usefulness of all elements of the method. They also

expressed their intention to use the method. They

deemed the method’s compatibility (with the current

way of work in the organisation) to be low.

4.3 Strategic and Operational

Perspectives

In the last two phases of our study, semi-structured

interviews and focus groups were held to gain in-

sights into the operational and strategic views on the

method. In this section, we discuss the outcomes in

relation to the previously identiﬁed BITA challenges

of the organisation.

Strategy Formulation. Evolution plans provide

guidance and aid in the formulation of strategy by

forcing project teams to think differently and by

bringing strategy to the project level. Despite not be-

ing a crystal ball, the evolution plan prevents making

mistakes by providing a critical perspective and struc-

tured approach to strategic planning.

Relationship Between Business and IT.

organisation-wide thinking is stimulated by the

evolution plan. A project team within this case study

not only considered departments from the beginning

that should be involved, but later involved others that

would also be affected. Business and IT are brought

together through the evolution plan. This structured

method of collecting project information provides

a good basis for discussion between departments

and clariﬁes who is involved in a project. Thus, the

evolution plan encourages collaboration and prevents

departments from overriding one another. As a result,

business and IT can reach a consensus and build a

better relationship.

Digital Awareness Within Organisation. As part

of the evolution plan, (new) technological concepts

may be brought forward in project meetings, but they

do not directly improve digital awareness or knowl-

edge. When applying the evolution planning method,

business departments are able to provide structured

input on speciﬁc functionalities. In this way, infor-

mation can be shared in both directions, and bringing

together IT and business knowledge automatically in-

creases awareness.

Central Coordination. Although the evolution plan

adds value to managing individual projects, it has no

direct impact on centrally coordinating and prioritiz-

ing a multitude of them. It is nevertheless important

Validating a Practical Method for Planning Co-Evolution of Business and IT in a Public Sector Organisation

575

for all department managers to be aware of upcom-

ing or ongoing projects. It allows them to jump on

board if necessary or useful. As a result, the overall

project planning is improved and internal miscommu-

nications are avoided. By providing the necessary in-

formation to create an overview of upcoming projects

and ongoing projects, the evolution plan could en-

hance central coordination. In order to increase con-

trol over these projects, all roadmaps can be bundled

together.

Stakeholder Involvement. When a project begins,

stakeholders are brought to the forefront through the

evolution plan. The tool not only identiﬁes stake-

holders, but also discusses their impact and level of

support, as well as allowing project teams to con-

sider possible actions. While extensive labeling is

perceived as unhelpful, it does contribute to better

alignment of speciﬁc needs.

Current Situation Analysis. Despite the effort

involved, SWOT and TOWS analyses encourage

project teams to thoroughly analyze their current sit-

uation. They prevent the start of a project without an

overview of the current situation. In addition, it could

also prevent parallel actions or projects from being

initiated to accomplish the same goal. Even though

TOWS provides the needed motivation and substan-

tiation for the project’s aspirations, its added value is

subject to debate.

Strategy Implementation. In an evaluation plan,

all necessary actions are predeﬁned before the actual

start of a project, which forms the basis for a con-

crete action plan. Further, the evolution plan provides

higher management with structured information about

the project’s implementation. While in the case or-

ganisation, potential risks are often only considered

after a project has begun, an evaluation plan uses a

structured approach to surface potential risks and mit-

igation actions before the project starts. While the

evolution plan helps clarify in a pragmatic way the

practical execution of a project, it still lacks an ele-

ment to gather comprehensive functional or technical

information about the project, requiring the use of ad-

ditional tools in order to gather all information in one

place.

Deﬁning Clear Goals. The evolution plan plays an

important role in deﬁning the goals and added value

of projects. By doing so, stakeholders can reach a

consensus on the project’s objectives. Despite the

evolution plan outlining a project’s ambition, it does

not explicitly link it to the organisation’s overall ob-

jectives.

Monitoring and Evaluation. Regardless of the

length of a project, the evolution plan forces project

teams to consider monitoring and evaluation con-

sciously. By doing so, a project team can keep track

of the progress and goals of the project. Project mon-

itoring and evaluation cannot be overlooked when a

project team applies all the elements of the evolu-

tion plan. There are, however, some questions unan-

swered because this element has not been applied in

this study.

Existing Frameworks and Tools. In the past, the

case organisation tried to introduce a project informa-

tion sheet to raise awareness of a project approach,

but it was never really implemented. Existing other

frameworks have not been applied, mainly because

they are thought to be too theoretical and difﬁcult

to apply. With evolution planning, project teams are

guided through all the important project steps in a

structured and (chrono)logical manner. The appli-

cation of the evolution plan is also viewed as time-

consuming by some. This is why opinions about the

’lightweight’ label on the evolution plan differ. Possi-

bly, when using the method not just once, but repeat-

edly, teams will be able to apply it more efﬁciently.

Thus, the evolution planning method can be ex-

plicitly related to 10 out of 14 previously identiﬁed

BITA challenges. For the remaining four identiﬁed

BITA challenges (the digital evolution; dealing with

strategic new insights; IT innovation; customisation,

technical debt and complexity), a relation might exist,

but was not explicitly uncovered in our interviews.

In short, the evolution planning method was ex-

perienced, both at the strategic and operational level,

as an effective approach for countering many of the

identiﬁed BITA challenges.

5 DISCUSSION

In this section, we draw a number of general lessons

from our study results. Also, we discuss limitations,

threats to validity, and generalisability of our ﬁndings.

Finally, we share some reﬂections relevant to others

who may wish to run similar studies.

5.1 Lessons Learnt

A ﬁrst major takeaway from our study is that indeed

public sector organisations struggle with business-

IT challenges. In fact, the challenges identiﬁed

in the case organisation largely match those found

by Nodehi et al. (2023) when developing the evolu-

tion planning method.

Alignment challenges might even be greater in a

local government, such as our case organisation, com-

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576

pared to similar-sized organisations in the private sec-

tor due to operating in a wide range of knowledge do-

mains, each having its own requirements, constraints,

dynamics and (policy) goals.

The necessity for improving BITA is felt strongly

in public sector organisations, not to remain market-

competitive, but in order to cope in an agile way with

an ever-expanding suite of tasks, new demands for

implementation of laws and policy, and unexpected

societal events (e.g. the Covid-19 pandemic or the

refugee inﬂux from the Ukraine-Russia war).

Our study has shown that the evolution planning

method is valuable for Business-IT alignment in the

public sector. When applied to four projects in the

case organisation, the method was found to have a

strongly positive inﬂuence on the identiﬁed BITA

challenges. The domain experts, IT experts, and man-

agers involved in these projects were able to apply the

method successfully. They reported favorably on the

ease of use and usability of the method and explicitly

recognized its value in coping with their BITA chal-

lenges.

In particular, the evolution planning method was

experienced to facilitate broad and early stakeholder

involvement, to stimulate efﬁcient collaboration be-

tween departments, to help set and communicate clear

shareable goals, to expedite strategy implementation,

to drive thorough and timely analysis of current state

and future risks, and to increase chances of project

success.

The evolution planning contributed in a limited

way, or only indirectly, to increasing digital aware-

ness, improving central coordination, and strategy

formulation.

5.2 Limitations, Threats to Validity, and

Generalisability

Our case study covers only one public sector organi-

sation, more precisely one Flemish municipality. Be-

cause we established connections between speciﬁc

BITA challenges and elements in the evolution plan-

ning method that help solve them, we can hypothesize

that any (public sector) organisation that faces such

challenges would beneﬁt from the method. Still, fur-

ther study is needed to establish whether our results

can truly be generalized to other types of public sector

organisations in other geographical and cultural areas.

The researcher that acted as interviewer and mod-

erator of the focus groups was also an IT manager at

the case organisation. This may have introduced some

bias into the data collection. More importantly his

tacit knowledge (of the organisation) may have been

a factor in the successful application of the method.

This means that having an “internal” moderator may

be a best practice or prerequisite for using the method

with success.

The decision to use the evolution planning method

as a new approach in the four selected projects was

fully supported by the management of the case or-

ganisation. This decision was clearly communicated

throughout the organisation, as well as the theory be-

hind the method and the objectives the organisation

wanted to achieve with it. Thus, management support

and communication are likely also success factors that

must be replicated in any organisation that wants to

apply the method.

Our case was conducted on a tight time schedule.

The application of the method ended with the deliv-

ery of the four evolution plans. Success was measured

through the perception of the project team members,

during and right after the planning process. The ac-

tual execution of the delivered plans was still to be

initiated or ongoing when our study ended. Thus, to

validate that successful planning with the method ul-

timately also leads to successful projects, a follow-up

or longitudinal study would be needed.

Since project execution was out of scope, the ele-

ment of the planning method that involved monitoring

and evaluation was only described theoretically to the

participants. As also indicated by the participants, no

deﬁnitive conclusions could be drawn for these ele-

ments.

While we extensively studied the state of depar-

ture of the organisation regarding BITA in a qualita-

tive manner, we did not apply any standardized in-

strument for (quantitatively) measuring its alignment

maturity (Luftman et al., 2017). This could have been

useful, since alignment maturity at the outset might

be a factor for how fruitfully the method can be ap-

plied. On the other hand, this would add to the data

collection burden in the study.

In the study, we observed several indications that

the evolution planning method could be useful also

outside the speciﬁc context of Business-IT alignment.

Several of the identiﬁed challenges, such as stake-

holder engagement, current situation analysis, strat-

egy implementation, or clarifying goals, also occur

when IT is not involved. Hence, the method may like-

wise be useful to create alignment when organisations

consider general change initiatives.

5.3 Reﬂection

Some reﬂections on our case study could be useful for

researchers that might wish to run a similar study.

Validating a Practical Method for Planning Co-Evolution of Business and IT in a Public Sector Organisation

577

Firstly, the study greatly beneﬁted from thorough

preparation and strict planning. An extensive study

protocol was drawn up beforehand and used through-

out. This made it possible to run the study in a limited

time and obtain detailed and reliable results.

Secondly, data collection, processing, and analy-

sis proved to be a very intensive process due to the

large number of data points and the relatively short

duration of the study. Thus, when conducting a sim-

ilar study, sufﬁcient research support should be bud-

geted.

Thirdly, we took care to spread the evaluation of

the method over a number of focus group sessions

(5 per project) that were separated by about 1 week.

This ensured that adequate time could be spent intro-

ducing, implementing, and evaluating all method ele-

ments.

Finally, we were able to conduct all interviews

and focus groups in person. This allowed ample in-

teraction and information exchange and ensured that

highly valuable feedback could be captured.

6 CONCLUSION

In this paper, we have reported on the ﬁndings of

the ﬁrst ﬁeld experiment for the evolution planning

method proposed by Nodehi et al. (2023). Through

our case study, involving 4 changes initiatives in a lo-

cal governmental organisation, we have been able to

make a number of contributions to the BITA body of

knowledge:

• We conﬁrmed that the BITA challenges identiﬁed

by Nodehi et al. (2023) through interviews with

experts from multiple private sector organisations

likewise are present in public sector organisations.

• We extended the evidence of the usefulness of the

evolution planning method. This evidence was

limited to educational pilots and expert interviews

and is now extended with a comprehensive case

study in a public sector organisation.

• We were able to link speciﬁc BITA challenges to

speciﬁc elements or characteristics of the evolu-

tion planning method that help to resolve these

challenges. This elucidates why the method is ef-

fective.

• We identiﬁed several possible improvements of

the evolution planning method, either to remedy

weaknesses, or to reﬁne the method for use in the

public sector.

Based on these contributions, we see several avenues

for future work:

• Though comprehensive, our case study involved

only a single public sector case organisation. Ad-

ditional case studies in both private and more pub-

lic sector organisations are needed.

• Our case study was limited to the planning phase

itself. Follow-up or longitudinal studies would

allow us to study whether successful planning

also leads to successful projects. They would

also speciﬁcally allow to more closely study of

the ‘monitoring and evaluation’ elements of the

method, which come into play during project ex-

ecution.

• Suggested improvements and adjustments that

were identiﬁed in the course of our case study

can be used to develop an improved version of

the evolution planning method. Such an improved

version could then be subjected again to ﬁeld test-

ing.

Finally, we list a number of recommendations for the

successful application of the planning method in prac-

tice, which may be taken into account by organisa-

tions that wish to use the method:

• The evolution planning method looks almost de-

ceptively simple, but requires substantial atten-

tion, thought, and collaboration to apply well. The

method is best learned by a combination of careful

explanation, moderated application, and learning

by doing.

• To enhance knowledge of evolution planning and

promoting its adoption, management should con-

sider to organize ‘evolution planning expert meet-

ings’ where projects are discussed and new in-

sights, knowledge, challenges, and success stories

are shared.

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APPENDIX

During the case study, participants suggested a num-

ber of improvements to the method, the evolution plan

template, or the supporting data collection spread-

sheet. These suggestions are listed here.

Intro

• Use different ﬁelds to add additional information

(not all information in 1 comment-ﬁeld)

• Add mandatory ﬁelds for budget & link to strate-

gic plan (MYP)

• Add a ﬁeld for project description (it is not explic-

itly mentioned)

• Add a ﬁeld for description of project scope (in &

out of scope)

• Add a ﬁeld for project accountability (e.g. mem-

ber of the CMA)

• Add a ﬁeld for describing the reason for doing a

project

• Add a ﬁeld for management summary

• Mention the dates of any project change in this

element

• Add the function of project members + date that

they started participating in the project

• Add a clear deﬁnition of the role of a project

owner

Stakeholder Analysis

• Do not use the terms promotors, defenders, latents

and audience. Just add two yes/no ﬁelds for ‘stake

in the project’ and ‘inﬂuence over the project’ to

avoid confusion.

• Creation of two separate columns for stakeholder

and stakeholder group

• Usage of a drop-down menu to select stakeholder

groups, impact or support levels

Current Situation

• Split up one large ﬁeld into separate rows for

SWOT and TOWS information

• Bundle SWOT and TOWS into a single-screen

Ambition

• Drop-down list to choose stakeholders that were

already mentioned in the previous element

Gap Analysis

• Drop-down menu for selecting ‘type of gap’

• Add other type of gaps that are more speciﬁc for

the case organisation (e.g. security, efﬁciency,. . . )

• Provide clear deﬁnitions of the type of gaps

Validating a Practical Method for Planning Co-Evolution of Business and IT in a Public Sector Organisation

579

Design Moves

• Avoid confusion about the name ‘design moves’

(i.c. better translation into Dutch)

• Avoid outcome and output to be formulated too

ambitiously.

• Emphasize the horizontal approach of this ele-

ment (i.c. not ﬁrst go through all possible design

moves)

• Costs should be more elaborated instead of being

mentioned in one single column

Beneﬁt Generation

• Automatic selection of previous information (e.g.

design moves, stakeholders) via a drop-down

Risk Assessment

• Drop-down menu to select design moves from the

previous element

• Attention must be paid regarding to the translation

of the risk-matrix terminology

• Using the risk matrix should be made more easy

and efﬁcient

Mitigation Actions

• Risk ID’s and risks should be added automatically

based on the previous element

• Using the risk matrix should be made more easy

and efﬁcient (pointers and arrows)

Roadmap

• Integration with a Gantt-chart tool would be an

advantage

• Another speciﬁc tool for creating roadmaps shall

provide a better overview of (the timing of) mul-

tiple projects

Monitoring and Evaluation [This element is not

tested in practice during the research and only ex-

plained theoretically.]

Evolution Plan as a Whole

• Add extra tab that can be used to collect all func-

tional/technical needs in a project

• Automating the data collection form would im-

prove efﬁciency and user experience

• Explicitly mention ‘project communication’ in the

methodology (e.g. as a recurring design move or

extra tab)

• Only use the most important information for the

ﬁnal (strategical) PowerPoint or use another doc-

ument format

• Provide a methodology example that is based on

the case organisation

• Add an extra tab for ‘Lessons learned’

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