This paper, as its title suggests, provides a thorough and systematic, if at times tedious, review of the literature on the alignment between business strategy and information technology (IT) strategy. The authors identify target journals and pose nine research questions to be explored in a review of articles from those journals, focusing on topics such as the background, definitions, and motivations for alignment; various meanings of alignment and related terms; challenges in alignment; and so on. For each of the nine research questions, the authors provide a summary of the existing literature based on the identified sources. After documenting the existing literature, the authors summarize their findings in 14 specific observations. Finally, they provide specific areas for future research.

The paper provides a solid review of the literature; as such, it would be of interest to anyone who wishes to get a handle on current research in this area. However, it suffers from two flaws that are hard to overlook. First, it provides a lot of details without the organizing ideas that would help the reader make sense of them. The readability suffers badly, and this makes the paper more of a reference than something engaging and informative. Second, due to the lack of any organizing structure, it is unclear how the bits were taken from the source articles, how the conclusions were drawn, and how the findings point to the suggested directions for future research. Other researchers embarking on the same task may very well come up with very different results.

A popular format for dissertations these days is a three-essay format in which the first essay provides a review of relevant literature. The purpose of the first essay is for the student to demonstrate to his or her mentor that he or she has a grasp of the current literature. This paper is very reminiscent of a first essay. Therefore, it would probably be of most interest to a doctoral student attempting to get up to speed on the literature or looking for research ideas; it will be of limited value to others.