Valuating IT Governance Strategies With Real Options in a Decision Making Framework

Introduction

IT Governance is meant to define the objectives assigned to the information technology, to plan, to set and implement the processes related to the management of the IT life cycle. It corresponds to the implementation of the means necessary for the decision makers to ensure that the organization IT meets the preset company strategies and objectives. A basic definition of governance is to consider that it describes how a system is managed and controlled. Thus defined, governance is the combination of monitoring i.e. ensuring that today's decisions prepare tomorrow properly, and control i.e. measuring the gap in comparison to what was expected, states Peter Weill (2004). A major preoccupation for the IT steering committee is to construct a proper board based on control elements that can be measured in terms of their importance level responding to change and to rising issues.

ROA offers decision-makers a varied range of tools to manage risk and uncertainty in their investments. It also provides advanced scenario analysis that an organization can use to address management accounting issues and IT governance strategic objectives. However, the application of financial techniques of ROA is subject to criticism due to the fact that essential assumptions are not fulfilled as pointed out by Ullrich (2013). The fact that gathering data that directly fits into models described in ROA is difficult. There is some information, like the cost and benefit estimates. However, to calculate real option theory parameters happens to be hardly evident (Asundi & Kazman, 2001). The idea of transferring ROA to real investments trace back to Myers (1974), whereas, the application of ROA to the valuation of IT investments started in the early 1990s. Since then, major advances have been made with significant results. In his good overview about managerial flexibility, Trigeorgis (1996) takes over the main options that could be implemented with ROA. Taudes (1998) introduces a flexible ROA model responding to changes in an organization environment. On their part, Benaroch et al. (1999) focus their research on determining the optimal timing of investing. More recently, Hilhorst et al. (2006) consider individual preferences besides a market valuation combined with a ROA model, while Angelou et al. (2009) apply the Analytical Hierarchy Process, through which different sources of uncertainty are modeled. Munoz et al. (2011) consider ROA as a decision-making tool to assess investments in a specific risk management context. A simplified options-based decision rule is proposed in (Crasselt & Lohmann, 2016). In this paper, the authors suggest the use of ROA as a decision-making tool which responds to IT governance constraints. Kim & Eom (2016) in their good survey about decision support systems framework, identify the tools used at the managerial level to build such frameworks.