A Chief Executive Officer and Chief Information Officer Consensus Decision-making Model for Information Technology Investments

This non-experimental mixed methods research study identified current decision criteria or metrics used by CEOs and CIOs in determining IT investment decisions through a modified Delphi technique and attempted to reach a consensus decision model. The study found that all executives generally agree to the need for multiple criteria in IT decision making. There was also some agreement within each group about the relative importance of decision-making metrics; however, the differences in the criteria that were most important to CEOs did not prove to be the same as for CIOs. Consequently, a unified IT decision-making model was not possible from this study. The process of this multi-phase study, however, could be easily applied to specific industries and/or individual companies to develop a much better decision-making model for IT investments than currently exists in most companies.