The Business Value of Information Technology: Models, Empirical Analysis, and Application

组织不断增加对信息技术（IT）的投资，作为实现更高绩效水平的一种手段，因为他们的主管将这些投资视为对抗全球竞争影响的一种方式。IT被视为通过以下方式创造商业价值的一种手段：自动化——用资本取代高成本劳动力，从而提高生产率并降低成本结构；信息化——缩短新产品推出周期；和转换—通过使用IT功能重新设计来改进业务流程。不断上升的IT成本和关于回报的经验证据的缺乏导致了研究人员和高级管理人员对IT的最终回报的质疑。最近的一些研究已经证明了IT投资的积极回报，而另一些则没有，因此仍然存在重要的问题。有大量的组织变量可以调节IT的收益，这些变量在微观经济学分析中被忽略了，并且对于更好地理解IT管理非常重要。行为分析表明，组织绩效既取决于企业战略的选择，也取决于战略的执行，而信息技术通过一系列组织与信息技术的联系，主要对战略的执行做出了贡献。本研究测试了这些联系的解释模型，并评估了IT对业务价值的贡献。该研究由美国国家科学基金会/私营部门联合倡议与合作组织计算机科学公司研究和咨询服务共同资助。

Organizations continue to increase their investments in information technology (IT) as a means of achieving higher levels of performance because their executives see these investments as a way to counter the impact of global competition. IT is seen as a means to create business value through: automation - substituting capital for high cost labor thereby improving productivity and reducing cost structures; informatization - reducing cycle times for new product introduction; and transformation - improving business processes in general through redesign using IT capabilities. The continually higher IT costs and the lack of empirical evidence about payoffs have resulted in questions by researchers and senior executives about the final payoffs from IT. Some recent studies have demonstrated a positive return on IT investments, while others have not, and so significant questions remain. There are a large number of organizational variables that mediate the payoff from IT, which are omitted in microeconomic analyses, and that are important to understand for better IT management. Behavioral analyses indicate that organizational performance depends on the choice of a firm's strategy as well as its execution, and that IT contributes primarily to the latter though a set of organization-IT linkages. This research tests an explanatory model of these linkages and assesses the contribution of IT to business value. The research is funded under the Joint NSF/Private Sector Initiative with the cooperating organization, Computer Sciences Corporation Research and Advisory Services.