A Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis Approach for Aligning IT and Supply Chain Strategies

As a component of Information Technology Governance, Business-Information Technology Alignment (BITA) is more and more critical to the survival of enterprises. It ensures that Information Technology (IT) strategy is aligned and supports the business strategy, unleashing the potential of IT an avoiding loss of resources. The strategic alignment is a multi-criteria situation with a certain level of uncertainty for the Decision Makers (DM). There is a gap in the literature for IT alignment in a Supply Chain (SC) context with multi-criteria decision methods. This paper introduces a MCDM approach to align the IT and SC strategies. Furthermore, it provides a comparison between the Fuzzy Technique for Order of Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (FTOPSIS) and a hybrid Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process (FAHP) FTOPSIS approach in aligning the IT strategy to the SC strategy. The approach introduced herein is illustrated for the case of a public pharmaceutical SC in Morocco. The results have shown the advantages of the fuzzy character of the methods at the strategic level and the differences between them for the prioritisation of the IT strategy.