MAGT 410

The impact of IS
on decision
making
[Introduction, literature review
and methodology]

Introduction:

[The purpose of this research is to define the impact managing project using the appropriate
information system on enhancing decision making. This research will define the factors of decision
making, that are derived from the Information System, those factors will be defined using literature
review, which demonstrates how managing project can be affected using the right information system
along with other factors, that will be mentioned in the research. The empirical method is used to
identify the relationship between the decision making which is the dependent variable and the
Information System the independent variable. At the end of the research the results will be shown and
illustrated by using the program of SPSS]
In this environment of the competition and leading it's critical for
the organization to know how to practice project management,
using the appropriate resources to facilitate this important task, one
of these resources is using the appropriate Information system.
Managing projects can be a difficult task if the necessary resources
were used. To enhance the function of managing projects and
facilitate it along with the revolution of technology, there are some
Information Systems were developed particularly to aid managing
project and decision making, but choosing the best and the
appropriate Information System can be a difficult and a complex
task (Havelka & Rajkumar,2006; Iacovou & Dexter, 2004). In fact
there are some firms such as Standish Group has developed entire
consulting practices studying the factors that cause the managing
the project to fail with an aid of Information System (Hartmann,
2006; Rubinstein, 2007). With an estimated $255 billion being spent
on Information System/IT applications annually (Havelka &
Rajkumar, 2006), it's important to choose the appropriate
Information System in order the project will be managed effectively
and will lead to a successful decision making. Since the decision
making in project management needs accurate predictions and
sometimes the support of metrics to finally reach the appropriate
decision upon the project (Antonia Bertolino, Eda Marchetti and
Raffaela Mirandola 2007). Project Management (PM) is face with
hard decision along with assigning the right resources to the right
tasks. The ability to plan projects, acquire necessary support, and
solve unforeseen problems requires knowledge that is hard to define
(Richard A. Huff, Victor R. Prybutok 2008). It is wrong to think that
project management can be successful by using the appropriate
Information System only; there some other factors that are derived
from will be shown in the literature review, some of these factors
dominate the success of managing projects just like the Experience
(Iansiti, 2000), some of them rely on the infrastructure of the IT in
the organization like applying well-known techniques from the field
of the IT to assist decision making (Smith and Williams 2001). The
decision making when managing project using the appropriate
Information System can be reached by concentrating on the spot of
Performance analysis which also lead us to choose the best
information system that support the feature of analyzing the
performance (Smithand Williams 2001, Antonia Bertolino, Eda
Marchetti and Raffaela Mirandola 2007 ). The pervious source
suggest that using the technology of Propean (for PROject
PErformance ANalysis) in based on the combination of classical
performance engineering techniques and the Unified Modeling
Language (UML) can help assessing the time to completion of
specified activities, handling personnel multi-tasking over different
projects, optimizing the workloads in development cycles, deciding
about products release, and similar issues. This technique will be
introduced and illustrated in the literature review. There is no doubt
that knowing the right information system will highly impact the
way that the project manager handle and manage the project, the
project manager can highlight the strength and the weakness of the
project, whether the resources are assigned correctly to the tasks
and to help and defect any surprising regulations, not to mention
using the performance analysis PA can help the project manager to
identify the capability to handle parallel multi projects at a time,
obtained predictions rely on a solid mathematical background and
have statistical validity (Antonia Bertolino, Eda Marchetti and
Raffaela Mirandola 2007), on the other hand the authors mentioned
that that they are aware of the skills needed to use PA information
system or any other one are not necessarily available in an ordinary
project manager(Pooley 2000), this problem can be overcome by
the UML representation language.

Literature review:
  Defining Project management and performance:

To start with , project management in information system can be

define as the application of formal and informal knowledge, skills,
tools and techniques to develop a system that provides a desired
level of functionality on time and within budget (Schwalbe, K.,
Information Technology Project Management, Course Technology,
Boston, 2004.) as we can see from this definition, there a quite
strong link between the project management and the Information
system , project management bottom line is to get the right
decision , the right information system that is based on the
appropriate application form and user friendly representation can
lead to right decisions , without going over budget and run out of
time. While going through lots of resources, there has been a
terminology of "Project performance" linked with the success of the
project. Project performance can be analyzed by using project
analysis. Before going to the appropriate information system, what
are the characteristics of the project that impacts its performance
and success? Those characteristics should be defined before
starting the project, so the performance of the project can be
analyzed by using the preferable information system; they can be
associated with project size, technological complexity and change,
and the newness of the application influence the outcome of large
projects (NANCY L.MARTIN, J. MICHAEL PEARSON, and KIMBERLY
FURUMO 2007). Among those characteristics, the project size has
been pointed out as the main problem that's linked with the project
failure (Kirsch, L.J, 2000). With the rapid changes in science and
technology it has increased the choices of the right information
system, starting with software solutions running on distributed
platforms, web-based applications, user friendly interfaces to legacy
systems, purchased application packages or a combination of these
and other solutions (Lam, W. 2003, Schambach, T.P., Walstrom, K.A.
2001). A point added to the previous statement is the creation of
software that would assist in project management and lead to the
right decision making, just like the Propean that will be explained
later.

 Factors associated with decision making:

 Experience:

Research has established that lack of experience with a technology

and low project specific knowledge in an organization are associated
with a higher risk of project failure (NANCY L.MARTIN, J. MICHAEL
PEARSON, and KIMBERLY FURUMO 2007) , it is really important for
the project manager to have a very deep experience and full
background about the process of project management and decision
making in particular, failure because lack of experience can cause a
huge damage in the project team leading to a lot cracks among
several levels, one of them is trust, Research has shown that team
member trust is a key antecedent to collaboration (Kanawattanachai
& Yoo, 2002). Kanawattanachai has found out that found that trust
results in open communication, cooperation, higher-quality decision
making, and risk taking. So it's important for the project manager as
the leader of the project team to plays an important role in
establishing clarity in generating collaboration and trust among the
project team members (Anantatmula, 2008). Trust is considered one
of the main enablers to manage local and global projects (Adenfelt
and Lagerström, 2006). Some researches have been done to relies
the effect of the experience on the success or the failure of the
project, considering the experience in the IT field, since this
research is talking about the usage of the information system in
enhancing the decision making, research has confirmed that lack of
experience with a technology has a direct effect on project
completion and an indirect effect on budget variances (Yetton, P.,
Martin, A., Sharma, R., Johnston, K., 2000). Also when the
technology used in managing project is new to the organization, it is
more likely to outsource vendors and consultants to participate in
the project, and since the technology is being improved day by day,
packages are being developed, researchers think that it is possible
for the organization to deal with more than 50 to 100 vendors
(NANCY L.MARTIN, J. MICHAEL PEARSON, and KIMBERLY FURUMO
2007). With all of these aspects we can relies the importance of the
experience of the project manager, he or she needs to have a full
background in managing teams and creating trust within this team
not to mention to motivate the team towards working with passion
and loyalty to achieve the project, but the most important thing is
that the project manager should have enough background in IT field
and Information system, so he or she can be able to identify the
right information system platform to assist in taking decision. It is
vital to mention that experience can be strongly linked with
knowledge and performance, along with the ability, the diagram
below shows how those four elements can interact together to affect
the project end.

The diagram suggests that the knowledge is information stored in

memory, and ability as the capacity to complete information
encoding, retrieval, and analysis tasks. It theorizes that additional
applicable experience increases the amount of stored knowledge
available for decision making. As the level of relevant, available
knowledge increases, the performance level also increases (Richard
A. Huff, Victor R. Prybutok 2008 )
H0: Can experience negatively affect the decision making using the right information system?

 Project characteristics:

There are a lot of previous theories conducted that the project

characteristics directly impact the project management, particularly
if we are talking about the project size, the complexity of the
technology used in the information system, and the technical
infrastructure that the organization possess (NANCY L.MARTIN, J.
MICHAEL PEARSON, and KIMBERLY FURUMO 2007). The definition of
the IT project complexity and size can't be defined clearly, as
sometime the project complexity is based on the project size. The
project size can be measured based one several measures such as:
how much many have the organization spent on the project, the
number of people in the project team, or the number of the
information systems platforms that have been used to create the
final project (Kirsch, L.J., 2000). The project complexity has a huge
impact on the project team and the project manager in particular
when choosing the appropriate information system to use, there is
no one clear option, but many. And with today's everyday changing
environment there are a lot of technical solutions to choose from
the ERP systems, legacy system and specialized software (Lam, W.,
2005 and Schambach, T.P., Walstrom, K.A., 2005). This variety of
solutions may lead the organization of a lack of knowledge and
experience to choose the right information system. And as we
indicate before, this kind of lack may highly lead to project failure
(NANCY L.MARTIN, J. MICHAEL PEARSON, and KIMBERLY FURUMO
2007).

H1: Can project characteristics negatively affect the decision making using the right information system?

 Risk propensity:
There are always risks behind every project; it is the responsibility
of the project manager to identify the risk of the project he or she
manages, this can be done by using an Information system platform
or the through the experience and the knowledge of the manager.
There is always uncertainty due to the lack of knowledge.
Researchers have found that the risk and the risk level affect the
behavior of the decision maker, also as the knowledge and the
background of the manager increases, the willingness to accept
project with high level of risk increases (Richard A. Huff, Victor R.
Prybutok 2008). It is stated that managers with high risk propensity
concentrate more on the gain of the project rather than the cost; on
the other hand, managers with low risk propensity concentrate on
the cost rather than the gain (Jiang, J.J., Klein, G., Means, T.L., 2000).
The manager job the scope of risk is to the lead the project to the
final stage of completion while controlling known and predicted
risks, and dealing with unforeseen ones(Khattab, A. A., Anchir, J., &
Davies, E. 2007) Another diagram illustrates how to possibly
determine the risk behavior of the manager based on several
factors.

The risk preferences along with the inertia and the history of the
manger can shape the risk propensity of the manager which will
lead to identify his or her risk behavior (Richard A. Huff, Victor R.
Prybutok 2008).

H3: Can risk propensity negatively affect the decision making using the right information system?

 Project performance and analysis:

The Project performance profile is specifically designed for capturing

the performance requirements that will lead the project to success;
it is beneficial in terms of cost, schedule, scope and people, and
improvement in organizational profitability (Rad, P.F., 2001). In this
everyday changing environment, it is crucial to measure the
expected project performance and analyze it in details, to measure
all the aspects surrounding the project's success or failure. The
study of (Antonia Bertolino, Eda Marchetti and Raffaela Mirandola
2007) suggests using a software measure the performance and uses
it for analysis to finally get the facts based on solid mathematical
facts. It has presented the technique of Propean, based on the
combination of classical performance engineering techniques and
the Unified Modeling Language (UML). The idea of using
performance techniques is not totally new in project management,
but limited as it has been used once in 1995 in Adler et al. and since
then it has been developed to meet with the modern changes, for
simulating the performance of cooperating maintenance service
centers geographically distributed, as in Antoniol et al in 2004.
Propean technique goal is to propose the manager reliable and
sound solutions in decision making process, especially when project
is associated with developing software since Propean can assist and
provide the basics to take decisions at any level of development.
Another technique has been introduced to measure the
performance; queuing theory has been applied to model software
maintenance request requests (Ramaswamy 2000).

H4: Can Project performance and analysis negatively affect the decision making using the right

information system?

The empirical methodology:

Research hypothesis:

After reviewing the factors that affects the decision making process,
it is expected from the next section to review the relationship of
each of those factors with the decision making progress.
Experience, Project characteristics, Risk propensity and Project
performance and analysis may interact with the decision making
progress.

As it obvious the decision making is dependent variable, and the

information system is the independent variable that has four
factors:

1. Experience
 2. Project characteristics

3. Risk propensity

4. and Project performance and analysis

To collect more information about how those factors in Information

System affect the decision making progress, there will be a
questionnaire to be handled to people involved in Project
management and Information system, then the data collected will
submitted in the SPSS program to find the relationship, and create
the link between the hypothesizes of the factors.