How Financial Firms Decide on Technology

(Part Two)

　　For the first question, we develop a structured framework for cataloging IT investment practices and then populate this framework using a combination of surveys and semi-structured interviews. We then compare the results of this exercise with a synthesis of the literature on IT decision making to understanding how practices vary across firms and the extent to which this is consistent with "best practices" as described in previous literature. Finally, we will compare these processes to internal and external performance metrics to better understand which sets of practices appear to be most effective.

　　To make these comparisons concrete, we examine both the general decision process as well as the specific processes used for two recent IT investment decisions :the adoption of computer-based home banking (PC banking), and the development of the corporate web site. These decisions were chosen because they were recent and are related but provide some contrast; in particular, PC banking is a fairly well defined product innovation, while the corporate web presence is more of an infrastructure investment which is less well-defined in terms of objectives and business ownership.

　　Overall, we find that while some aspects of the decision process are fairly similar across institutions and often conform to "best practice" as defined by previous literature, there are several areas where there is large variation in practice among the banks and between actual and theoretical best practice. Most banks have a strong and standardized project management for ongoing systems projects, and formal structures for insuring that line-managers and systems people are in contact at the initiation of technology projects. At the same time, many banks have relatively weak processes(both formal and informal) for identifying new IT investment opportunities, allocating resources across organizational lines, and funding exploratory or infrastructure projects with long term or uncertain payoffs.

　　The reminder of this paper is organized as follows. Section 2 describes the previous literature on performance of financial institutions and the effects of IT on performance. Section 3 describes the methods and data. Section 4 describes the current academic thinking on various components of the decision process and compares that to actual practices at the banks we visited. Section 5 describes the results of our in-depth study of PC banking projects and the summary, Section 6 contains a similar analysis for the Corporate Web Site and discussion and conclusion appear in Section 7.