during the past two decades business and manufacturing have observed significant and radical changes. companies have used automation in the manufacturing, in order to improve quality and competency. it was expected that along with these changes, management accounting systems, which focus on monitoring and analyzing management decisions, should adapt with and encourage the changes. many authors ...

The aim of this paper is to justify the use of constant mix investment strategies as an approximation for periodically rebalanced investment strategies. In Dhaene et al. (2005), general optimization problems are solved in a lognormal framework by deriving convex order bounds based on comonotonicity. The multi-period optimal portfolio selection problems discussed in Dhaene et al. (2005) are solv...

Business/ICT (Information and Communication Technology) alignment is an ongoing concern for both academics and practitioners. However, little academic research focuses on the process or practice of alignment. In this paper we build a theoretical model and test it empirically. We investigate the influence of ICT management intensity and investment justification on alignment. Four indicators are ...

This paper presents the preliminary results of an action research project in a large Norwegian oil and petrochemical company. It focuses on the pilot phase of the project for testing the feasibility and practicality of the unified justification and evaluation framework (UJEF) developed by the authors based on extant IT investment justification and evaluation theories and frameworks. The UJEF fr...

This case study illustrates the application of Six Sigma process improvement to software upgrades justification. Specifically, software use was simulated based on business process maps and data provided by users. The simulation results were combined with upgrade investment estimates to calculate the return on investment and justify the upgrades.

Learning Objectives After studying this chapter, you will be able to: Identify the major aspects of the economics of information technology. Explain and discuss the productivity paradox. Describe approaches for evaluating IT investment and explain why it is difficult to do it. Understand the nature of intangible benefits and the approaches to deal with such benefits. List and briefly describe t...

The Justification of Information Technology (IT) and Information Systems (IS) is inherently complex, since there are a large range of benefits that are intangible and non-financial. However, it is not only the benefits of IT/IS that present this difficulty but also the range of indirect costs associated with an IT/IS deployment. Therefore, many justification processes are exclusively based on t...