A major question confronting management in U.S. industry is whether the anticipated economic benefits of investments in information technologies are being realized. the results from prior reported empirical research on this question are at best mixed. The researchers consider this problem to be a measurement related issue, and they develop a theory and methodology for determining the economic impacts of "business value" of information technology. The focus of the research is on the firm and its profit centers as the unit of analysis. The research is planned in three phases. The first phase involves a statistical analysis of manufacturing industry data acquired by the investigators to test several conjectures on prior discrepancies and estimate a theoretical model. Based on these results, the model is refined in phase two and further tested (validated) with two new data sets from banking and insurance industry firms. The third phase synthesizes management implications of the research for information technology investment decisions.
