Gauging the Quality of Managerial Decisions Regarding Information Technology Deployment

Abstract

This paper presents a new approach for evaluating the quality ofmanagerial choices in information technology (IT) deployment. Theapproach involves measuring the extent to which deployment sitesperform in accordance with the firm's objectives, given theconstraints of their competitive environment. Our method is tomodel environmental descriptors as inputs to a production processthat yields business outputs. This production process is thenevaluated via standard productivity assessment methods to obtain"competitive efficiency� scores. Interpreting why differentdeployment sites exhibit different levels of competitive efficiencyinvolves estimating regression models in which competitiveefficiency scores are the dependent variables and management's ITdesign choices are the independent variables. Such measurement andinterpretative methods provide managers with new tools to improvetheir IT location and design decisions. Our framework isillustrated in the context of automatic teller machine (ATM)deployment.