The Strategic IS Decision-Making Process

Abstract: Since the early 1980’s and up until today many organizations have realized the importance of paying more and more attention to the effective strategic planning of the information systems resources. There are several reasons for this that where recognized by Pyburn (1983), one was the high speed of technological progress both in regards to IT and Telecoms facilities. Another key factor, which is very valid for this research, is the application of these facilities in problem domains which have a critical impact on an organizations success in performing its tasks. When new areas of opportunity for such applications grow constantly it has become more and more complex to match the operational, tactical, and strategic needs of the business with the appropriate systems activities. With this thesis we wanted to research how the Executive management of an international corporation handles the demands for key IS functionality in relationship to their desire to get a “Go”-decision for a strategic IS implementation project. Our method to either prove or disprove our hypothesis was to perform a case study through semi-structured interviews. We were given a unique opportunity in our research to be able to interactively follow an ongoing decision-making process at an international corporation in the process of doing a feasibility study for a strategic IS project. The result of our research shows a much more drastic picture than we had ever expected. We concluded based on our empirical findings that issues that eventually lead to the potential failure of an IS investment starts even before the “Go/No-Go”-decision is being made. The results of our research contributes to the existing literature in this field by offering deeper insights into the strategic decision-making process and the effects of concessions in functionality in an IS system in order to achieve the desired decision, despite potentially negative consequences for the implementation.