COPS: A model and infrastructure for secure and fair electronic markets
Decision Support Systems - Special issue for business to business electronic commerce, issues and solutions
Decision Support Systems - Special issue: Decision support systems: Directions for the next decade
Data warehouse governance: best practices at blue cross and blue shield of North Carolina
Decision Support Systems
Information technology and internal firm organization: an exploratory analysis
Journal of Management Information Systems - Special section: Strategic and competitive information systems
ERP systems adoption: An exploratory study of the organizational factors and impacts of ERP success
Information and Management
Journal of Management Information Systems
A Framework for Assessing the Business Value of Information Technology Infrastructures
Journal of Management Information Systems
Involving top management in IT projects
Communications of the ACM
Assessing the strategic value of Information Technology: An analysis on the insurance sector
Information and Management
Fix IT-business relationships through better decision rights
Communications of the ACM
Short-term prediction models for server management in Internet-based contexts
Decision Support Systems
The influence of governance equilibrium on ERP project success
Decision Support Systems - Special issue: Economics and information systems
IT alignment strategies for customer relationship management
Decision Support Systems
Yield management of workforce for IT service providers
Decision Support Systems
When Is the Right Time to Refresh Knowledge Discovered from Data?
Operations Research
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Information technology (IT) requires a significant investment, involving up to 10.5% of revenue for some firms. Managers responsible for aligning IT investments with their firm's strategy seek to minimize technology costs, while ensuring that the IT infrastructure can accommodate increasing utilization, new software applications, and modifications to existing software applications. It becomes more challenging to align IT infrastructure and IT investments with firm strategy when firms operate in multiple geographic markets, because the firm faces different competitive positions and unique challenges in each market. We discussed these challenges with IT executives at four Forbes Global 2000 firms headquartered in Northern Europe. We build on interviews with these executives to develop a discrete-time, finite-horizon Markov decision model to identify the most economically-beneficial IT infrastructure configuration from a set of alternatives. While more flexibility is always better (all else equal) and lower cost is always better (all else equal), our model helps firms evaluate the tradeoff between flexibility and cost given their business strategy and corporate structure. Our model supports firms in the decision process by incorporating their data and allowing firms to include their expectations of how future business conditions may impact the need to make IT changes. Because the model is flexible enough to accept parameters across a range of business strategies and corporate structures, the model can help inform decisions and ensure that design choices are consistent with firm strategy.