Gauging the quality of managerial decisions regarding information technology deployment

An approach is presented for evaluating the quality of managerial choices in information technology (IT) deployment. The approach involves measuring the extent to which deployment sites perform in accordance with the firm´s objectives, given the constraints in their competitive environment. The method is to model environmental descriptors as inputs to a production process that yields business outputs. This production process is then evaluated via standard productivity assessment methods to obtain `competitive efficiency´ scores. Interpreting why different deployment sites exhibit different levels of competitive efficiency involves estimating regression models in which competitive efficiency scores are the dependent variables and management´s IT design choices are the independent variables. Such measurement and interpretative methods provide managers with new tools to improve their IT location and design decisions. The framework is illustrated in the context of automatic teller machine (ATM) deployment