Toward an IT investment decision support model for global enterprises

With the emergence of information technology (IT), many international companies capitalize on IT to improve their management and operation to obtain the competitive advantages. But, the implementation of IT investment in many companies has not been completely successful to achieve the expected goal and unfortunately result in the miserable forfeiture. Meanwhile, the decision support system of IT investment has not been mature enough to be built to assist decision maker in a comprehensive manner to effectively handle the IT investment for international companies. To bridge this gap, the purpose of this study is to develop an effective and operational, integrated research framework to support the IT investment decisions of international businesses with a variety of subordinating branches located worldwide. In specific, the framework examines the IT investment decisions with six constructs including finance, strategy, information, organization, process and technology; and incorporate 30 measurement indicators. An IT investment decision support system is thus developed based on the aforementioned constructs and measurement variables incorporated in this research. Weights which are analyze by applying the AHP method are assigned for the six constructs to evaluate the necessity and efficacy of an IT investment decision. This support system can be used to facilitate the allocation of budgets for conducting the IT investment, providing a better control over the progress of IT investment execution and implementation and identifying the most useful attributes and generating the valuable insights for the trans-departmental or international IT projects.