Effects of Project Owner’s Title on the Financial Impacts of IT Systems Integration Outsourcing Projects

ABSTRACT

Does the title type of IT project owners facilitate financial impacts on cost-efficiency, productivity, and profitability? We investigate these questions using a large dataset of 112 IT systems integration outsourcing projects of publicly traded companies during 1995–2010. While project owners with IT affiliations bring down operating and overhead expenses, projects managed by executives with non-IT titles improve firm profitability, and that the contribution of IT leadership on firm revenue is not significant.

KEYWORDS:

• Financial metrics
• outsourcing
• systems integration

Acknowledgments

This work was supported in part by the Bear Stearns Information Technology Research Center at the Muma College of Business, University of South Florida. The authors wish to thank the anonymous referees for their comments.

Appendix A

Table A1. Project owner titles

Table A2. Sector-wide distribution of companies of different sizes (IDC, 2011).

Notes

^1. We call project owners with the title of CIO or an executive with IT background collectively as CIO.

^2. www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=IDC_P13012.

^3. www.bea.gov.

^4. Will be made available online upon request.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Shankar Prawesh

Shankar Prawesh is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Industrial and Management Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kanpur, India. His current research interests include IT management, agent-based simulation, and data analytics. His articles have appeared in Information Systems Research and ACM RecSys. His research also received best paper (runner-up) award in WITS-2012. Prior to joining IIT Kanpur, he was a post-doctoral research associate at Robert H. Smith School of Business, University of Maryland, College Park. He received his PhD from the University of South Florida.

Manish Agrawal

Manish Agrawal is an Associate Professor in the Department of Information Systems and Decision Sciences at the University of South Florida. His research interests include information security, software quality, and agent-based systems. His articles have appeared in journals including MIS Quarterly, Management Science, INFORMS Journal on Computing, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, Journal of Management Information Systems, ACM Transactions on Information Technology, and Communications of the ACM. His research received the Design Science Award from the INFORMS Information Systems Society. He received his PhD from SUNY Buffalo. Agrawal is a member of AIS and INFORMS.

Kaushal Chari

Kaushal Chari is a Professor and an Associate Dean at the Muma College of Business, University of South Florida. His current research interests include software engineering and analytics. His articles have appeared in such journals as Information Systems Research, Management Science, INFORMS Journal on Computing, and IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering. He is a co-winner of the Design Science Award from the INFORMS Information Systems Society. He received his PhD from the University of Iowa.