Key concerns of executives making IS decisions

The results of a study of several hundred executives making information-system decisions are reported. The goal is to provide insight for IS decision-makers to develop new IS infrastructures, and to position their organization strategically. The study indicates that IS executives are focusing their attention on emerging technologies (such as networking, connectivity, and voice/data) with strategic implications. Meanwhile, as organizations evolve, the executives´ focus moves from structured operational and computational concerns, such as backlog and security, within the organization to unstructured temporal and strategic issues in the environment. These results further suggest a three-phase process where networking (phase 1) provides the backbone structure for the connectivity of diverse and often incompatible systems (phase 2), which in turn makes available opportunities for strategic computing (phase 3)