Analyzing IT business values – A Dominance based Rough Sets Approach perspective

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 influences 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 fleet of vehicles besides others. In this article we apply it for the first time to the analysis of IT business value. We use ordinal data of a survey on IT management strategies of Australian firms 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.