Ideally, organizations should always have a high level of strategic IS alignment." When an organization needs to change business or IS strategies, it should modify all four aspects of strategic IS alignment (business strategy, IS role, IS sourcing, and IS structure) in a synchronized fashion such that alignment is maintained. We depict this ideal trajectory on the left side of Figure 2. However, our research on strategic IS alignment (see Appendix) suggests
that this ideal trajectory is rarely followed. Instead, organizations seek alignment
through some amount of incrementalism—changing one or more of the four components of strategic IS alignment in one direction, then changing some other components, and occasionally undoing recent changes. Three trajectories—paradoxical decisions, excessive transformations, and uncertain turnarounds—occur as part of these efforts toward alignment. As shown on the right side of Figure 2, organizations may decide to change one or more of the four components
in one direction while changing some others in the opposite direction (paradoxical decisions), go too far in changing one or more components (excessive transformations), or reverse a recent change and move back toward the original position (uncertain turnaround).
Following is a description of three organizations and their struggles with strategic alignment. First, we want to acknowledge that the framework we propose is a simplified description of a complex area. To keep the scope here manageable, we have excluded other dimensions of organizations, such as organization structure and business environment, which have an impact on