Investment Strategy for Integrating Wireless Technology into Organizations

Abstract

Firms rely on IT investments (Demirhan et al., 2002; Tuten, 2003), because a growing number of executives believe that investments in information technology (IT) (i.e., wireless technologies) help boost firm performance. The use of wireless communications and computing is growing quickly (Kim & Steinfield, 2004; Leung & Cheung, 2004; Yang et al., 2004). But issues of risk and uncertainty due to technical, organizational, and environmental factors continue to hinder executive efforts to produce meaningful evaluation of investment in wireless technology (Smith et al., 2002). Despite the use of investment appraisal techniques, executives often are forced to rely on instinct when finalizing wireless investment decisions. A key problem with evaluation techniques, it emerges, is their treatment of uncertainty and their failure to account for the fact that outside of a decision to reject an investment outright, firms may have an option to defer an investment until a later period (Tallon et al., 2002).