Information technology benefits

Many companies and other organizations have adopted new information technology in the past decade, expending considerable effort and resources to do so. Understandably, their managers wish to evaluate whether the organization's benefits from these new technologies exceeded the cost of acquisition and adoption. There is a large and growing literature on this subject, but methods to evaluate utility and appropriateness of information technology have not kept pace with the technological advances. Good methods of evaluation do exist, but they are not prominent in the literature. Using such methods and developing new ones represent an important challenge and opportunity for OR/MS analysts.

Much of the published work on the subject, especially in business journals, has focused on examining whether firms' profits, typically reported quarterly, rose substantially in a fairly short time after adoption of new information technology. Usually they did not, and various authors have expended...