Nowadays exists a great deal of methodologies, frameworks and tools for analyzing, evaluating and facilitate effective decision-making related to IT at the organization. IT governance, strategic IT planning, Framework for Information Strategies, IT Transformation Knowledge Base & Methodology, COBIT, ITIL, Investment Portfolio Management Framework, are some available approaches intended to analyze, qualify and quantify IT related decisions in order to maximize the company value creation processes supported on information technologies.

However, the access to advanced frameworks and tools for evaluating IT alternatives is limited for some small and medium organizations due to capital, educational and organizational constraints. It is possible to advise that small and medium organizations face similar scenarios for decision-making related to IT investment, over and over. In most cases, the IT decisions are taken in unstructured and unorganized way without taking advantage of the knowledge acquired through previous process.

Objectives:

The main objectives of this project are:

1.    Model the IT decisions that are made over and over again by different organizations (e.g. providers, platforms) and analyze the implications taking these decisions in term of time, cost, risks, IT/business metrics, among others. 

2.    Propose a structured guideline to facilitate to small and medium organizations analyzing and evaluating alternatives for IT investment. In particular, investments related to enterprise systems (ERP, CRM, SCM, etc.), business process management solutions, business intelligence solutions, cloud computing, etc.  

3.    Design and implement a simulation tool intended to conduct serious games to facilitate the analysis of different scenarios for decision-making and evaluate possible results by choosing among the different alternatives.

Main results:

Modeling and simulation of decision-making in Enterprise Information Systems:

The project is planned in three phases. The initial phase is intended to establish actual models for decision-making and to analyze real scenarios and study cases of investments process in small and medium organizations. This is done in order to characterize a typical baseline scenario for investments in enterprise systems.

The second phase is intended to establish the framework and guidelines that will allow conduct the decision making process and to take structured and well supported decisions. This phase considers the definition of measures for evaluating the IT investment decisions.

The last phase is planned for designing and implementing the software tool that will allow the organization to define base scenarios, to play with the different choices for investment, and to analyze the possible outcomes of these decisions.