Effective information systems planning

Information Systems (IS) managers need to optimize and balance multiple objectives, manage resources, prioritize projects, enforce alignment with business goals, etc. while making IT investment decisions. These decisions are not made in isolation but must be part of a coherent plan in order to achieve the organization's IT goals. Effective planning involves correctly identifying the organizational IS needs and finding efficient mechanisms to fulfill them; these can be understood as identifying IS ``ends'' and ``means'' respectively. In this dissertation, we make new contributions to both of these aspects of planning: When determining an organization's goal or ``ends'', we demonstrate the importance of considering rarity of IT capabilities in evaluating the goal. More fundamentally, we describe a framework to model the IS planning process of an organization as a Markov Decision Process: this mathematical formalism allows us to elegantly capture several important features of the planning process that have been described in the literature. With an effective model of the planning process (the ``means'' of planning), we can then study the impact of various planning dimensions on plan effectiveness. We focus on two primary dimensions: first, the length of the IT planning horizon and second, whether and how an organization engages in double-loop learning to reconcile discrepancies between its espoused objective and its objective in use. We show that the impact of these dimensions on plan effectiveness varies by organizational strategy type.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Business Administration

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2014

Author dc:creator

• Sethi, Ruchika

Contributors dc:contributor

• Shaw, Michael J.
• Subramanyam, Ramanath
• Larson, Eric C.
• Kwon, Hyok-Jon D.

• Information Systems (IS)
• Information Systems (IS) Planning

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 2014 Ruchika Sethi

Language dc:language

en

Handle dc:identifier

http://hdl.handle.net/2142/50606

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/50606