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Published 2006 | Published
Book Section - Chapter Open

Enterprise Computing Systems as Information Factories

Abstract

The analysis, and eventual approval or rejection, of new enterprise information technology (IT) initiatives often proceeds on the basis of informal estimates of return on investment. Investment in new IT initiatives includes the costs of hardware, software licenses, application development tailored to the enterprise, and maintenance. Returns are typically estimated informally in terms of cost savings or revenue increases. This paper makes the case for evaluating certain IT investments in the same way as investments in factories and other resources have been evaluated for decades. Just as industrial factories create value by transforming raw materials into finished products, some IT investments, which we call "information factories", create value by transforming raw information (events) into structured data (and possibly actions based on that data). The return on investment is estimated by the difference between the economic value of the structured data and concomitant actions (the "finished product") and that of the data available within the enterprise, from its partners and customers, and from the Internet (the "raw materials"). This paper introduces the concept of the information factory, and explores design considerations for maximizing the economic efficiency of information factories.

Additional Information

© 2006 IEEE. Issue Date: Oct. 2006, Date of Current Version: 19 December 2006. The research described in this paper has been supported in part by the National Science Foundation under grant CCR-0312778, ITR: Information Infrastructures for Crisis Management, and by the Lee Center for Advanced Networking at Caltech.

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Published - Chandy2006p907510Th_Ieee_International_Enterprise_Distributed_Object_Computing_Conference_Proceedings.pdf

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Chandy2006p907510Th_Ieee_International_Enterprise_Distributed_Object_Computing_Conference_Proceedings.pdf

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Created:
August 19, 2023
Modified:
January 13, 2024