Learning Objectives

After completing this chapter, you should be able to:

• Define "critical success factors".

• Explain how critical success factors are used in organization strategic planning and IT investment decision-making.

• Explain how to develop a set of critical success factors.

• Explain what the "Delphi method" is and how it can be used in IT investment decision-making.

• Explain what the "balanced scorecard method" is and how it is related to strategic planning.

• Define the four perspectives of the "balanced scorecard method" and how they are related.

• Explain how the "balanced scorecard method" can be applied.

Introduction

In the previous three chapters of Part II, we focused on financial methods for information technology (IT) investments. This chapter is the first of three chapters in Part III, "Multi-Criteria Information Technology Decision-Making Methods" that redirect the focus of methodology to include broader issues of IT investment decision-making. That is, rather than focusing on one piece of IT or a single system decision or evaluation as chiefly a financial analysis, we look here at decision-making in general and investing in larger portions or whole systems. Many of the methodologies contained in Part III can also be used to make individual IT or subsystem decisions, but they have broader application and are generally more inclusive of decision-making criteria. This is why these methodologies are identified as "multi-criteria" in nature.

In this chapter we primarily introduce three conceptual methods called "critical success factors", the "Delphi method", and the "balanced scorecard method" as approaches to beginning a...