Domestic IT industry now reached at the management stage of informatization and is beyond the construction stage, as the scale of investment and the operating expenses for IT are increasing every year. However, despite the common awareness about the i...
Domestic IT industry now reached at the management stage of informatization and is beyond the construction stage, as the scale of investment and the operating expenses for IT are increasing every year. However, despite the common awareness about the importance of IT, there have been the cases of poor performance in terms of return of investment that necessarily demanding systematized processes for IT investment management and decision-making.
Although early researches on IT investment decision making focused on financial perspectives, it is proved that various factors as well as non-financial perspectives have direct or indirect influences. Thus, in this study, through an exploratory literature review, hypotheses were established that the factors such as IS qualities, financial expectation, financial slack, IT acceptance attitude, new business opportunity, business diversification, and isomorphism will affect on IT investment decision making process in a multilateral manner.
For an empirical research, a structural equation model was designed on a basis of those hypotheses, using TOE framework, a comprehensive conceptualization methodology that can generalize the results. And an on/off-line survey was conducted on executives and workers in varied fields of industries including manufacturers, distributors, and public institutes. The data of 317 samples was collected out of 532 questionnaires for analyzing to investigate the determinants of IT investment decision-making. In addition, differences according to respondents’ service type and job rank were identified in order to provide new perspective to further related studies. The results are as follows.
First, IS qualities in technological context, organizational IT attitudes and financial slack in organizational context, business diversification, normative pressure, and coercive pressure in environmental context significantly increase IT investment intention. The result solidify the findings of previous researches that not only financial perspectives, but also non-financial perspectives are concerned with IT investment decision making, and further discover new causalities of various factors that are unnoticed.
Second, service type has significant moderating effect in the process of IT investment decision making. Which means if you are IT consultant, you will make much account of future expectation like new business opportunity, and if you are working at SI or SM sector, you will consider current environment such as coercive pressure or mimetic pressure more importantly. The result showed that there are coexistence of goal-directed and problem-oriented perspectives, but they look same direction of winning corporate objectives through any form of IT investment decision making.
Third, job rank also have moderating effect on IT investment decision making. While cost (financial slack) and expectation (new business opportunity) are top priorities to executives and supervisors, but in case of uncertainty, they will follow footsteps of successful precedents (mimetic pressure). On the other hand, hands-on workers are susceptible to regulations (coercive pressure), and seek various solutions (business diversification) under given circumstances. The result emphasizes the necessity of listening as many opinions as possible when making IT investment decision to find practical key success factors.
It is hoped that this study can be a motivation for further researches regarding IT investment and IT success factors, and play an accelerating role in expanding research scope to those factors that have been paid little attention till now.