The relationship between business and information technology (IT) groups in organizations has consistently ranked as an important concern among business and IT managers. As a result, several researchers have investigated the means of improving the business/IT relationship. They focus on behaviors of business and IT groups and attempt to develop change management programs as a vehicle for obtaining desired behaviors from business and IT groups in order to improve the ' relationship' . However

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... earch shows that such attempts have a low success rate in attaining an effective ' relationship' . This paper argues that the reason for this is that most researchers tend to focus on behaviors of people without an in-depth understanding of their cognition, which influences those behaviors. Consequently the paper proposes a cognitive approach and explores the application of Personal Construct Theory (PCT) to understand the ' relationship' and means to improve it.