Expert Systems with Applications 38 (2011) 1112011128

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Expert Systems with Applications

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/eswa

Analyzing IT business values A Dominance based Rough Sets Approach perspective

Georg Peters a,, Simon Poon b
a b

Munich University of Applied Sciences, Department of Computer Science and Mathematics, 80335 Munich, Germany University of Sydney, School of Information Technologies, Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia

a r t i c l e

i n f o

a b s t r a c t
The impact of information technology (IT) on the business value of a cooperation has been an active research area for more than two decades. Although it is widely agreed that IT has a positive impact on the business values of cooperations an in-depth understanding of the underlying structures is still missing. Especially due to the huge investments in IT, there is still a need to better understand how IT inuences the performance of cooperations and business values. Generally, the data collected in IT business value research to be quantitative as well as of qualitative nature. While quantitative data can be examined by classic econometric methods the analysis of qualitative data requires special methods. In the case of ordinal data DRSA Dominance based Rough Sets Approach has been proposed. DRSA can be applied to induce rules out of a decision table containing ordinal data. This method has already successfully applied to such diverse areas like customer relationship management and satisfaction analysis, or the technical diagnostic of a eet of vehicles besides others. In this article we apply it for the rst time to the analysis of IT business value. We use ordinal data of a survey on IT management strategies of Australian rms conducted by the Australian Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts. The induces rules are interpreted and provide important insights into the impact of information technology on the business values of cooperations. Furthermore our study shows the potential of DRSA for information systems research where questionnaire are a widely applied technique to collect ordinal data. 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Keywords: IT business value Dominance based Rough Sets Approach Rule induction Analyzing questionnaires Information systems research

1. Introduction Motivation. The analysis of the impact of information technology on cooperations and economies has a long history of more than two decades. Carr (2003, 2004) controversially argues that IT has become a commodity and consequently has decreasing inuence on the competitiveness of organizations today. Independently from continuing the discussion if IT has become a commodity or not the signicant investments of cooperations in IT require to continuously critically question and optimize its effects on business values (short: IT business value). Therefore, deeper understanding of IT impacts on the business value of a cooperation is needed. Hence, continuous research on IT business values has been an important and active area in academia as well as in industry for decades. Many research studies utilizes quantitative, cardinal data and econometric models to bring new insights to IT business value research. However, due to the complexity of this research area quantitative analysis has often been complemented by qualitative method like questionnaires collecting non-cardinal data from
Corresponding author.
E-mail addresses: georg.peters@cs.hm.edu (G. Peters), simon.poon@sydney. edu.au (S. Poon). 0957-4174/$ - see front matter 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.eswa.2011.02.157

organizations, e.g. by interviewing CIO and IT project managers. As an example, the Australian Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts conducted a board survey on IT management strategies of Australian rms (Gregor et al., 2004). Data are measured in the form of likert scales. Greco, Matarazzo, and Slowinski (2001a) proposed Dominance based Rough Sets Approach (DRSA) which is regarded as one of the most suitable methods to analyze ordinal data. The DRSA analyzes ordinal data given in a decision table and induces rules out of it. These rules provide a sound foundation for a further analysis and interpretation by appropriate experts. Objective. The main objective of the article is to analyze IT business values by applying DRSA Dominance based Rough Sets Approach. We are aiming to provide new insights into the relationship of IT investments and the business values of cooperations. Furthermore, we show that DRSA is a very promising and adequate method to enrich the analysis of IT business value in particular and in information systems research in general. Structure. The article is organized as follows. In the next section we review research on IT business values in literature. In Section 3 we discuss the DRSA Dominance based Rough Sets Approach which will be used to analyze the survey data of the Australian Department of Communications, Information Technology and the

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Arts on IT management strategies of Australian rms (Gregor et al., 2004). In the following Section we present the results of our analysis and discuss them with respect to IT business value. The paper concludes with a summary in Section 5.

2. IT business values 2.1. Related literature It is well acknowledged that realizing business value from IT investments has been an important research area for more than two decades. Initially, IT business value research explored the relationship between IT investment and productivity. Subsequently, consistent empirical evidences of business benets gained through IT investments have emerged (Brynjolfsson & Hitt, 1996; Kohli & Devaraj, 2003; Poon & Davis, 2004). The recent focus is on how IT enables organizations to achieve better business value (e.g. Aral & Weill, 2006). Brynjolfsson, Hitt, and Yang (2000) see organizational complements [. . .] as a major driver of the contribution of information technology whereas Bresnahan, Brynjolfsson, and Hitt (2002) argued from an organizational perspective that the new work practices are more likely to detect a complementarity between IT and skilled work. Melville, Kraemer, and Gurbaxani (2004) concluded that IT business value is generated by the deployment of IT and complementary organizational resources. Several rm-level studies have found that IT investments generally contribute positively to rm-level productivity. However, there are still a number of unsolved issues in relation to why impacts of IT investments still vary widely among different companies. Brynjolfsson et al. (2000) argued that the complementary organizational practices could be thought of as a kind of input (as organizational capital) and are often omitted in the production analysis. They further argued that to realize the potential benets of computerization, investment of many additional assets such as new organizational processes and structures, workers knowledge, and redesigned monitoring, reporting and incentive systems may be needed. If complementary investments in organizational practice could explain part of the variation in IT payoffs, then the question is to understand what and how these practices would help companies to improve the impacts of IT more effectively to create value. For example, Aral and Weill (2006) found that complementarities between organizational capabilities and IT investments not only strengthened the impacts of IT on a rms performance, but they could also explain two to twelve percent of the business value variation among organizations. Our understanding interestingly to date of the complex relationships between IT use and organizational practices is sketchy. Black and Lynch (2001) studied the impacts of workplace practices, IT capital and human capital development on productivity. They found that whether or not an employer adopted a particular work practice was less associated with higher productivity growth than how work practice was actually implemented. They concluded that importance should be given to synergetic effects among workplace practices. Bresnahan et al. (2002) showed that rms who adopt a cluster of management practices (such as decentralized organizational structures and work structures) did appear to have a higher contribution of IT to productivity. There are also some conicting results. While Hempell, Leeuwen, and van der Wiel (2004) studied IT-using rms in Germany and Netherlands and found that IT was used more productively if it was complemented by the rms own innovation effects, but Arvanitis (2004) was unable to nd substantial complementarities between a bundle of all workplace practices (such as teamwork, job rotation and decentralization of decision making) and IT capital.

Tallon, Kraemer, and Gurbaxani (2000) investigated the impact of management practices such as IT alignment with business strategy, employee involvement, total quality management and reengineering on IT returns. They found that greater alignment of IT with business strategy tends to result in greater IT payoffs. However, their subsequent study (Tallon & Kraemer, 2003) found that strategic alignment could lead to increased payoffs from IT only up to a certain point beyond which further increases in strategic alignment appear to lead to lower IT payoffs. Although these research studies have shown some preliminary evidence of the benets of certain classes of organizational practices, the understanding of these organizational practices and how they relate to IT investment is yet to be further explored and investigated. Complementary organizational practices have been found to critically affect returns on IT investment achieved by companies. While some rm-level empirical studies have shown positive impact of the interactions between organizational practices and IT investment, there is a burgeoning theoretical and empirical debate on the existence of synergies in bundles of organizational practices and using IT (Poon, Poon, Peters, Gupta, & Land, 2010). 2.2. Review of applied methods Much of the research draws on quantitative data and the economic theory of production using different econometric models to analyze the impact of IT on cooperations and economies. Although economic theory has provided some useful guidance, researchers must remain cognizant of these differences and also recognisee that methodological choices can signicantly affect the research outcomes (Stiroh, 2004). Many econometric analysis assessing the impact of IT on productivity have suffered from a lack of specicity in conceptualizing the relationship between technology and the affected process or processes (Kelley, 1994). With the measurement problems in mind, not only does the quantication of output and input in physical terms introduce many hurdles, there are also critical concerns about the adequacy of models to represent the complex relationships among inputs. Therefore, recently econometric-based productivity analysis of IT business values has been complemented by organizationalbased studies. In this context, a main research challenge is to accurately analyze a large set of data about organizational practices where these data are often collected via survey questionnaire techniques. To support the analysis of the questionnaires a wide selection of statistical method (Sirkin, 2005) can be applied, ranging from very basic concepts as means and standard deviations to the testing of hypotheses. Furthermore, concepts like the mining of association rules (Agrawal, Imielinski, & Swami, 1993) and classication and regression tree (CART) analysis (Breiman, Friedman, Stone, & Olshen, 1984) have already applied in studies analyzing questionnaires on IT business values (Poon, Eugster, Davis, & Choi, 2007, 2009). Although these methods provided valuable insights on the analysis of IT business values the analysis was compromised. Classicationbased association rules (CAR) analysis is a very effective method to induce rules from multiple input variables to an outcome variable. Since CAR could only induces rule from categorical data, certain important information could be lost by treating ordinal value as categorical. CART however can handle data both numerical and categorical variables, but its limitation is the way it combine multiple input variables. Since CART follows a stepwise greedy approach, extracting rules from complex complementarities are heavily limited in particular, impacts from input variables with less independent effects are often disregarded. Due to limitations discussed here, the methodical toolbox for the analysis of questionnaires, especially when dealing with data

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on ordinal scales, has been very much enriched by a rough set theory based approach, namely DRSA Dominance based Rough Sets Approach which was proposed Greco et al. (2001a). Therefore, it is a very adequate methods for the analysis of the given data set and thence, will be applied in our present study on IT business values.

3. Relevant foundations of rough sets theory 3.1. Rough sets Rough sets were introduced by Pawlak (1982, 1991). Since then they have gained increasing importance in academia as well as in industry and can be considered as important approach within the framework of soft computing. Rough sets theory provides a rich bouquet of strong methods to support the analysis of decision tables as depicted in Table 1. Each record (row) of the table represents one case (object). A case is described by attributes and their values. Each case is characterized by a consequence respectively a decision. In particular, rough set theory provides strategies to:  reduce redundant data and to disclose the essential information in a decision table,  make underlying contradictions transparent in a decision table. These contradiction may be caused by inconsistencies within the data or by missing attributes,  deal with missing data. Rough sets provide alternative strategies to the commonly applied arbitrary replacements of the data by generating substitutes based on, e.g., means or neighbors.  generate IF [Condition] THEN [Decision] rules which reveal underlying structures within the area of application. Originally the data in a rough decision table had of categorical nature. However, in the meantime DRSA Dominance based Rough Sets Approach has been proposed (Greco et al., 2001a, Greco, Matarazzo, & Slowinski, 2006b; Greco, 2008) which provides a strong framework for the analysis of decision table containing ordinal data.

We will briey introduce to the principles of VC-DRSA using a small example in the eld of IT project management and controlling. Let us consider Table 2 summarizing the ctitious results of a questionnaire for CIO evaluating recent IT projects within their companies. The attributes, indicated by the prex a, are aTMS (Top Management Support), aPTC (Project Team Competence), aUTS (User Training on Software) and aPCO (Performance of the Consultants). The decision is indicated by the prex d: dPRS (Project Success). Then the table can be interpreted as follows, e.g. by transforming record #1 into a rule: IF [Top Management Support = average ^ Project Team Competence = high ^ User Training on Software = extensive ^ Performance of the Consultants = excellent] THEN [Project Success = high] Obviously, the values of all attributes as well as the decision are on ordinal scales (see Table 3). This ordinal nature of the attributes allows us to induce a set of ordinal rules out the decision table. For example, if we only consider the rst two records (#1 and #2) and disregard the remaining records #3 to #8. Obviously, record #1 dominates #2 since all attribute values as well as the decision of #1 are superior to #2. Therefore, we can induce the following rule: IF [Top Management Support # average] _ [Project Team Competence # high] _ [User Training on Software # extensive] _ [Performance of the Consultants # excellent] THEN [Project Success # high] Basically two kinds of rules can be induced (Slowinski & Greco, 2005): at least (#) as given above and at most (") rules. The at least rules require a certain minimum level of fulllment of the attributes to hold. Therefore, they show Threats for Deterioration. In contrast to that, the at most rules can be interpreted as Opportunities for Improving. Any improvements of the attribute values can possible improve the outcome. In our small example we only considered two records and were manually looking for Threats for Deterioration (at least rules). To nd a set of rules covering both rule types and that complies with the whole decision table VC-DRSA can be applied. We use jMAF software (Laboratory, 2009) for our analysis here. Applying VCDRSA the following (certain) rules are induced from Table 2: IF [Top Management Support # high] _ [Project Team Competence # high ^ Performance of Consultants # excellent] THEN [Project Success # high] IF [Performance of Consultants # excellent] THEN [Project Success # medium]

3.2. The Dominance based Rough Sets Approach DRSA Dominance based Rough Sets Approach has been suggested by Greco, Matarazzo, Slowinski, and Stefanowski (2001b) to analyze decision table containing ordinal data. In the meantime extensions of the DRSA have been proposed, e.g. Variable-Consistency DRSA (VC-DRSA) or Stochastic DRSA (Dembczynski, Greco, Kotlowski, & Slowinski, 2007). Especially, VC-DRSA has gained great attention in literature and has been applied to many real life situations already. The areas of application include customer relationship management (Liou, 2009), customer satisfaction analysis (Greco, Matarazzo, & Slowinsk, 2006a, 2007), analysis of the advantages of rms (Li, Liao, & Zhao, 2009), and the technical diagnostic of a eet of vehicles (Sawicki & Zak, 2009) besides others. Thence, we will use VC-DRSA for our analysis of our following small example.

Table 2 Evaluation of IT projects. # aTMS average low high average average low low high aPTC high weak high weak high medium medium medium aUTS extensive moderate moderate low extensive extensive low moderate aPCO excellent bad average excellent bad average bad average dPRS high low high medium low low medium high

Table 1 Layout of a decision table for rough set analysis. Attribute1 Case1 Case2 ... value11 value21 ... Attribute2 value11 value22 ... ... ... ... ... Consequence/decision decsion1 decsion2 ...

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

G. Peters, S. Poon / Expert Systems with Applications 38 (2011) 1112011128 Table 3 Ordinal attribute and decision values. Attribute aTMS aPTC aUTS aPCO dPRS Ordered attribute values low 0 average 0 high weak 0 medium 0 high low 0 moderate 0 extensive bad 0 average 0 excellent low 0 medium 0 high

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practices (independent variables) to capture different forms of IT benets (dependent variables). IT benets and organizational practices are characterized as follows: IT benets. The IT benets investigated in the study are:  Strategic Business Value (SBV)  Informational Business Value (IBV)  Transactional Business Value (TBV) In the questionnaire these values were collected in the form of a likert scale (1 10). They can be interpreted as 1nev er to ^ 10always achieving business value from a particular IT invest^ ment. In each rm multiple experts answered the questionnaire. The recorded values for a company equal the means of the answers and therefore are given in real numbers. Organizational practices. Table 4 lists the 11 organizational practices derived by Gregor et al. (2004). They have been identied to be important factors in analyzing IT business values in previous research studies (Gregor et al., 2004). The organizational practices were rated by management executives based on how often their organization performs certain practices, ranging from 1nev er, 2rarely, 3sometimes, 4often to ^ ^ ^ ^ 5always. In the following we will refer to it as frequency of ^ performance. 4.2. Preliminaries

IF [Top Management Support " low] _ [Performance of Consultants " bad] _ [Project Team Competence " weak] _ [Top Management Support " low ^ Project Team Competence " weak] THEN [Project Success " medium] Such a set of rules provides an excellent foundation for further interpretations by a domain expert. For example, when high top management support is given the project will be successful. However, a lack of top management support can be compensated by a high project team competence and an excellent performance of the consultants, etc. 3.3. Attractiveness of the rules In the context of knowledge representation Slowinski and Greco (2005) identied the criteria strength and the certainty as particularly adequate to measure the attractiveness of the rules. They are analogue concepts to well-established criteria in association rule mining established by Agrawal et al. (1993). Strength. The strength is dened as the percentage of the records that support a rule. For example, the rule IF [Top Management Support # high] THEN [Project Success # high] is supported by two records, namely #3 and #8. Since we have a total of eight rules the strength of this rule is 0.25 = 2/8. Note that, obviously, for a given data set the support is an identical indicator since it differs only by a constant factor (the total number of rules) from the strength. Certainty. Certainty is dened as the coverage of the inverse rule IF [Decision] THEN [Condition]. The coverage is dened as the number of the records supporting a rule over the total number of records that are covered by all rules leading to the same decision as the considered rule. In our case we get 2/3 for the non-inverse rule since it covers 2 of the 3 records that are covered by all rules that lead to the decision dPRS = high. As discussed before we have support = 2. For the inverse rule we get a certainty of 1 since the support equals 2 and the number of records that lead to the same decision as the considered rule is also 2. Note, that the term condence is used as a synonym for certainty (Greco, Matarazzo, & Slowinski, 2007) and that it can be initially set in experiments. 4. Analysis of business IT values by applying DRSA 4.1. Description of the data The Australian Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts conducted a broad study on key IT management strategies of Australian rms (Gregor et al., 2004). The study comprises of questionnaires on eleven organizational

Data preprocessing and preliminary insights. The original data set of the Australian Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts consists of 705 records. We eliminated the entries with missing data and obtained 406 records for our analysis. As discussed above the IT benets were collected ordinal scales ranging from 1 to 10. To reduce the complexity of our analysis we map them into the following four categories: low, medium and high and very_high achievements for business value. The observed frequencies of these categories are depicted in Table 5. Table 5 shows that, generally, IT has effects on all three business values with IBV having the highest impact followed by SBV and TBV. Experimental setup. Along the lines with the previous example we apply VC-DRSA (Greco et al., 2001b) and use the software tool
Table 4 Organizational practices as study factors. Attr. OP01 OP02 OP03 OP04 OP05 OP06 OP07 OP08 OP09 OP10 OP11 Meaning Project Management Business Case Post Implementation Change Management ICT Opportunism ICT Skill Level Business Strategy Planning ICT Strategic Planning Industry Leadership Formal Contracting ICT Integration

Table 5 Frequencies of the groups. low (63) SBV IBV TBV 8 5 18 medium (3 < to 6 7) 213 112 254 high (7 < to 6 8.5) 130 163 97 very_high (>8.5) 55 126 37

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jMAF (Laboratory of IDSS, 2009) to analyze the survey data. In the analysis we follow the structure suggested by Slowinski and Greco (2005) and group the rules into the categories Threats for Deterioration (at least rules: #) and Opportunities for Improving (at most rules: "). The certainty is preset to one in the experiments: certainty = 1. The quality of the rules is evaluated by their supports (=406 strength, since we have a total number of 406 records in our study). We summarize our results for each IT benet in two tables, a table depicting the rules and a table showing the counts for the at least rules. Table depicting the rules. For example, the rules for SBV are depicted in Table 6. The table has to read as follows, e.g. for the rules R01 (at least) and R025 (at most): R01 (at least rule): IF [OP02 # 5 ^ OP03 # 5 ^ OP04 # 3 ^ OP05 # 5 ^ OP06 # 4 ^ OP07 # 5 ^ OP09 # 5] THEN [SBV # very_high] R25 (at most rule): IF [OP06 " 1 ^ OP09 " 4] THEN [SBV " high]

Table showing the counts. Continuing the example on SBV, its counts are depicted in Table 7. The table has to be read as follows. E.g., let us consider OP02 and at least very_high benets for SBV. At least very_high SBV benets are only obtained in one rule, namely R01 and require always (5) the performance of OP02. We then dene the counts as the sum of the following products: supports multiplied by the frequencies of performance of an organizational practice. In our case we get: 20 = 4 5. Obviously, the higher the count the higher the importance of an organizational practice is with respect to an IT benet category. The overall importance of an organizational practice is indicated by the sum over all IT benet categories and shown in the last row of Table 7.

4.3. SBV Strategic Business Value Results. The results for SBV are depicted in Tables 6 and 7. In total 41 rules have been induced for SBV, 24 of them are at least rules while the remaining 17 are at most rules. Discussion for the at least rules. Tables 6 and 7 show that the very_high and high rules are weakly supported (maximal strength: support level of the most supported rule/total number of records in

Table 6 Rules for SBV (with S = Support) R# S At least Organizational practice OP 01 R01 R02 R03 R04 R05 R06 R07 R08 R09 R10 R11 R12 R13 R14 R15 R16 R17 R18 R19 R20 R21 R22 R23 R24 R# R25 R26 R27 R28 R29 R30 R31 R32 R33 R34 R35 R36 R37 R38 R39 R40 R41 4 9 13 15 8 12 14 11 6 321 112 240 255 247 304 304 284 287 54 274 114 125 69 125 S 22 18 21 19 35 26 53 49 29 62 29 24 40 65 42 43 34 very_high high high high high high high high high medium medium medium medium medium medium medium medium medium medium medium medium medium medium medium At most high high high high high high high high high high high high high high high high high 02 5 03 5 5 3 3 5 5 5 5 2 3 2 2 2 2 2 3 3 2 01 02 03 04 05 3 5 4 06 1 1 1 1 3 1 1 3 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 3 3 1 3 3 4 2 2 4 4 3 3 3 4 4 4 3 2 3 2 3 2 07 2 2 08 3 2 1 09 4 10 11 2 2 2 2 3 5 3 3 3 3 3 5 5 04 3 4 05 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 4 4 06 4 5 07 5 4 4 5 5 5 5 5 5 2 3 2 3 4 08 09 5 5 5 5 10 11

5 4

1 1

2 2 2

4 4 3

3 3 3

4 3

G. Peters, S. Poon / Expert Systems with Applications 38 (2011) 1112011128 Table 7 SBV: counts for at least rules. Organizational practice, OP 01 very_high high medium all 0 139 2897 3175 02 20 0 2010 2070 03 20 155 1176 1546 04 12 121 967 1245 05 20 423 2331 3237 06 16 175 2618 3016 07 20 245 1563 2113 08 0 52 730 834 09 20 180 642 1062 10 0 70 0 140

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11 0 56 2754 2866

Table 8 Rules for high IBV (with S = support) R# S At least Organizational practice OP 01 R01 R02 R03 R04 R05 R06 R07 R08 R09 R10 R11 R12 R13 R14 R15 R16 R17 R18 R19 R20 R21 R22 R23 R24 R25 R26 R27 R28 R29 R30 R31 R# 4 4 5 4 6 5 19 20 10 18 13 11 18 15 10 15 10 9 7 188 112 102 81 69 35 147 147 134 159 129 102 S very_high very_high very_high very_high very_high very_high high high high high high high high high high high high high high medium medium medium medium medium medium medium medium medium medium medium medium At most 5 02 4 4 5 5 5 5 03 4 5 5 5 5 04 5 5 4 3 3 5 3 4 5 2 3 2 5 5 4 2 5 5 5 05 4 4 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 4 4 4 06 07 5 08 5 5 4 5 4 5 5 5 5 5 5 3 4 3 4 5 5 4 3 5 5 4 5 5 5 5 5 2 3 3 5 5 4 5 5 5 5 09 10 11

4 5 5 5 5 5 4 4 4 4 4 4 01 3 4 4 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 2 2 4

Table 9 IBV: Counts for At Least Rules Organizational practice, OP 01 very_high high medium all 20 142 2120 2464 02 132 75 1229 1775 03 111 297 510 1437 04 87 242 175 920 05 132 849 2057 4151 06 50 165 921 1401 07 75 119 0 463 08 95 154 0 593 09 38 459 702 1734 10 40 100 294 614 11 30 360 536 1346

the dataset = 15/406 = 0.04). Even the percentage of the maximal support to the total number of rule leading to very_high respectively high is low for these rules (very_high: support of R01/total number of records with at least very high SBV = 4/55 = 0.07; and high: support of R04/total number of records with at least high SBV = 15/130 = 0.12). Therefore, the interpretative power of the very_high and high rules is limited. Nevertheless, they show a clear tendency as we will discussed below. OP05 (ICT Opportunism) by far plays the most important role to obtain at least high SBV. In only two out of the nine rules (R01 to

R09) it has to be at least 4 (often performed). In the remaining rules it has to be even 5 (always performed). Rule R01 indicates that OP02 (Business Cases), OP03 (Post Implementation), OP07 (Business Strategy Planning) and OP09 (Industry Leadership) must be always performed to obtain very_high SBV. The high relevance of these factors (except OP02) is also indicated by their high frequencies of performance (P3) in the rule R02 to R09. In contrast to that high frequencies of performance of OP08 (ICT Strategic Planning) and OP11 (ICT Integration) seem to be

11126 Table 10 Rules for high TBV (with S = Support). R# S At least

G. Peters, S. Poon / Expert Systems with Applications 38 (2011) 1112011128

Organizational practice, OP 01 02 5 5 03 04 5 5 5 4 4 3 2 5 05 5 4 4 5 4 4 5 3 06 4 5 5 5 5 07 5 4 5 5 5 08 09 10 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 11

R01 R02 R03 R04 R05 R06 R07 R08 R09 R10 R11 R12 R13 R14 R15 R16 R17 R18 R19 R20 R21 R22 R23 R24 R25 R26 R27 R28 R29 R30 R# R31 R32 R33 R34 R35 R36 R37 R38 R39 R40 R41 R42 R43 R44 R45 R46 R47 R48 R49 R50 R51

2 5 4 6 8 7 7 33 76 71 152 129 111 53 65 54 37 72 65 90 83 81 27 65 47 43 105 121 114 46 S 56 20 90 38 45 51 41 60 36 42 32 24 50 36 55 45 29 27 50 55 34

very_high high high high high high high medium medium medium medium medium medium medium medium medium medium medium medium medium medium medium medium medium medium medium medium medium medium medium At most high high high high high high high high high high high high high high high high high high high high high

4 4 4 4 5 5 5 4 4 4 4 4

5 5

4 3 2 2 4 3 5 5 3 3 4 4 4 5 2 4 3 3 5 5 3 3 3 07 08 3 2 2 4 5 2 5 4 4 4

4 4 5 4 3 4 4 4 3 3 2 2 2 3

4 3

4 4

4 4 4 4 4 5

3 06 2 3 3

01

02

03

04

05

09 1 2 3

10

11 1

1 1 1 2 1 2 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 2 1

4 1 3 3

4 3 2 3

3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3

2 3 3 3 3 4 4 3 2 3 3 3

2 1

2 4 4 4 3 3

2 3

Table 11 TBV: counts for at least rules. Organizational practice, OP 01 very_high high medium all 0 0 1872 1872 02 10 10 2349 2597 03 0 20 2758 3220 04 10 132 527 878 05 10 136 789 3008 06 0 145 2258 2756 07 0 116 1252 1403 08 0 0 975 2005 09 0 0 1319 2139 10 10 120 629 853 11 0 40 803 1577

not necessarily needed to obtain high or very_high SBV. Business Cases (OP02) appear be the least important attribute. It only appears in the weakly supported rule R01 with a decision very_high.

When comparing R02 to the rules R03-R05 we see that high frequencies of performance of OP04 (Change Management) and OP06 (ICT Skill Level) can be replace the medium to high frequencies of performance of other factors with OP09 (Industry Leadership) of

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special importance. A comparison of R06 and R07 shows that a high frequency of performance of OP03 (Post Implementation) can be compensated by OP01 (Project Management) and OP11 (ICT Integration). Medium rules are much better supported in comparison to the very_high and high rules (with about half of the rules with strengths of at least 0.5). The rules show that there are several congurations that lead to at least medium results without any dominating organizational practice. Discussion for the at most rules. The results for the at most rules are depicted in Table 6. Most of the at most rules are supported with strengths of 0.05 or higher. Especially OP06 (ICT Skill Level) and OP09 (Industry Leadership) provide opportunities for improvement. To obtain very_high SBV an average frequency of performance of ICT Skill Level (OP06) is insufcient, while weak positions in Industry Leadership (OP09) also threaten the increase in SBV. Moreover, a virtual lack of Change Management (OP04) limits SBV. 4.4. IBV Information Business Value Results. The particular impact of the organizational practices on IBV that was already observed in Table 5 can be conrmed by a look at the obtained rules as shown in Table 8 and the related counts as depicted in Table 9. The number of rules where at least high IBV are obtained exceeds the number of rules for SBV and TBV (see below) signicantly: a total of 9 rules with at least high SBV, 19 rules with at least high IBV, and 7 rules with at least high TBV. Thence, the possible congurations for the organizational practices are much more versatile for IBV than in the other two cases. Discussion for the at least rules. Along the lines with SBV, Tables 8 and 9 show that OP05 (ICT Opportunism) is of prominent importance for IBV also. Additionally, in most cases, OP04 (Change Management) and OP09 (Industry Leadership) must reach certain frequencies of performance to obtain an at least high IBV. In contrast to that, the lower frequency of appearance in the rules of OP01 (Project Management), OP07 (Business Strategy Planning) and OP10 (Formal Contracting) indicate that these organizational practices are in fewer congurations of importance. Discussion for the at most rules. No at most rules (Opportunities for Improving) are observed in the data set. This indicates that the observed conguration already supports IBV well. 4.5. TBV Transactional Business Value Results. The results for the at most rules are depicted in Tables 10 and 11. A total of 51 rules are obtained, 30 at least and 21 at most rules. As discussed before the number of rule leading to at least high IT business values is lower than in the previous cases of SBV and IBV. Therefore, the impact of the analyzed congurations on TBV can be regarded as weaker than in the cases of SBV and IBV. Thence, we address the obtained results only briey here. Discussion for the at least rules. The analysis of the impact of the organizational practices on TBV (see Tables 10 and 11) conrms the importance of OP05 (ICT Opportunism) again. However, in contrast to SBV and IBV the inuence seems to be weaker since a frequency of performance of 4 or less is sufcient in more than 50% of the rules. OP04 (Change Management) has a comparable importance while the organizational practices OP01 (Project Management) and OP08 (ICT Strategic Planning) appear in no conguration. Discussion for the at most rules. The analysis of the at most rules show that specially OP06 (ICT Skills Level) provides opportunities for improvements. It appears in a high percentage of rule with a limiting frequency of performance of 3 (sometimes). The remaining organizational practices provide no distinct opportunities for

improvements for TBV, in particular OP02 (Business Case), OP08 (ICT Strategic Planning), OP10 (Formal Contracting) and OP11 (ICT Integration).

5. Conclusion In the article we analyzed survey data on IT management strategies of Australian rms collected by the Australian Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts. Our objective was to nd insights into the impact of information technology on the business value of cooperations. Our analysis disclosed that the identied organizational practices have diverse impacts on the three dimensions of IT business value, namely SBV (Strategic BV), IBV (Informational BV) and TBV (Transactional BV). The highest impact of the organizational practices is on IBV followed by SBV and TBV. The dominating effect on IBV go along the lines that the core objective of IT to manage information. The analysis of SBV, IBV and TBV clearly shows that the organizational practice ICT Opportunism (OP05) has a preeminent impact on archieving business values. This goes along the lines with the industry trend to replace custom software by ERP solutions of renown vendors. The importance of Change Management (OP04) for archieving business values can also be considered as high. At the rst sight is seems to be surprising that the impact of Project Management (OP01) on IT business value is of minor importance. However, Project Management is often regarded on operational rather than on strategic levels. Therefore, its impact on business value might be considered as small. The same applies to ICT Integration (OP11). The remaining organizational practices are of average importance for achieving IT business values. Our research also proofs that DRSA Dominance based Rough Sets Approach is a very adequate method to analyze the given ordinal data on IT business value. Furthermore, our study shows the great potential of DRSA for information systems research where questionnaires are a widely applied technique to obtain new insights into the non-linear relationships between the factors relating to IT investments and organizational performance. It is because organizational success often depends critically on the degree of nonlinearity mapping between organizational factors to performance. DRSA has provided us a new perspective in this direction. References
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