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Determining the Business Value of Advanced Information Technologies

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A dvanced Information Technologies can play a key role in understanding and dealing with the future. Developing digital libraries, agent-based software systems, and data warehouses for decision support has become a popular but exceedingly demanding and costly activity in information systems development and management. According to Chorafas, software agents market is expected to grow to $3-4 billion by year 2000. According to Forrester Research Inc., 96% of the Fortune 1000 firms surveyed planned on implementing Data Warehouses. These systems are expensive undertaking, with a typical warehouse costing in excess of $1 million. They are also challenging projects because of a number of related technical and organizational issues with the initial failure rate estimated at 50%. Implementing digital libraries is also a very high cost and resource intensive effort.

Our approach is to study advanced information technologies from a managerial perspective. In this research, we are seeking to answer questions such as: what are some of the implementation challenges, what benefits can be realized and how can these benefits be quantified. Answer to these questions can help develop a methodology to improve the probability of success of data warehouses, agent-based software systems and digital libraries. We have undertaken a case-study approach to evaluate implementations. Our case studies are being conducted with several companies including, a large multinational semi-conductor manufacturing organization, a defense contractor, and a missile manufacturing company. We plan to develop metrics for one implementation and then replicate and apply them for other implementations. Our perspective on metrics is that they should be robust, parsimonious and easy to measure, and additionally, application of the metrics should result in an easy and unambiguous interpretation.

Our research will result in the development of generalizable measures to evaluate data warehouses, agent-based software systems, and digital libraries, strategies to apply metrics, and support evolution of these advanced information technologies with on-going evaluation. Additionally, it will provide insights into the advanced information technologies development process and facilitate the development of future data warehouses, agent-based software systems and digital libraries within an organization.

Sponsor: Raytheon, Intel

Please click HERE for a PowerPoint presentation of the project.

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