RESEARCHERS: Vijay Gurbaxani, Kenneth L. Kraemer


CRITO researchers teamed up with the consulting arm of Computer Sciences Corporation in a study benchmarking the information systems (IS) function through annual surveys (fiscal years 1988-1994) of IS management in approximately 50 major U.S. companies. In addition, business unit executives were surveyed regarding the performance of the IS function. The key findings from this study focused on trends in information systems spending within companies and the allocation of information systems budgets to their component categories. A key finding which challenged the prevailing conventional wisdom was that in spite of the declining unit costs of hardware, the ratio of software costs (including programming labor and purchased software) to hardware costs stayed constant over time. In addition to numerous management reports, the key academic papers from this study were published in the premier academic journals, including Management Science and Information Systems Research.