The effects of IT chargeback on strategic alignment and performance: the contingent roles of business executives' IT competence and CIOs' business competence

PurposeIn the era of the digital economy, organizations are under much pressure to justify their information technology (IT) spending on digital transformation. Some organizations have thus implemented IT chargeback, an IT governance (ITG) mechanism, to clarify and allocate IT costs among various business units. While practitioners have stressed the importance of IT chargeback, there has been little theoretical effort that investigates its strategic effects and boundary conditions.Design/methodology/approachSynthesizing the ITG literature and the resource-based view (RBV), the authors develop a research model to examine if IT chargeback affects IT–business strategic alignment and, in turn, organizational performance and how human IT resources strengthen the impacts of IT chargeback. The authors designed a survey to collect data from 103 firms and tested the model using partial least squares (PLS).FindingsThe authors found that IT chargeback promoted strategic alignment and then organizational performance only for firms with business-competent chief information officers (CIOs), rather than IT-competent business executives.Originality/valueThis study enriches the ITG literature by exploring the strategic value of an IT cost governance mechanism (i.e. IT chargeback). This study further proposes and validates a measure of IT chargeback. Drawing on the RBV, this study quantitatively investigates the strategic impacts and boundary contingencies of IT chargeback. This study also advances the CIO literature by identifying the strategic leading role, instead of the traditional supporting role, of CIOs in modern organizations.