Enterprise Computing Systems as Information Factories

The analysis, and eventual approval or rejection, of new enterprise information technology (IT) initiatives often proceeds on the basis of informal estimates of return on investment. Investment in new IT initiatives includes the costs of hardware, software licenses, application development tailored to the enterprise, and maintenance. Returns are typically estimated informally in terms of cost savings or revenue increases. This paper makes the case for evaluating certain IT investments in the same way as investments in factories and other resources have been evaluated for decades. Just as industrial factories create value by transforming raw materials into finished products, some IT investments, which we call “information factories”, create value by transforming raw information (events) into structured data (and possibly actions based on that data). The return on investment is estimated by the difference between the economic value of the structured data and concomitant actions (th...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: EDOC
• Authors: K. Mani Chandy, Lu Tian, Daniel M. Zimmerman
• Keywords: EDOC 2006, Factories Create Value, Information Factories, Investment, Operating System