【正文】 idely, there are some general points of parison.　　For the qualitative portion, the major issue is whether the plan explicitly addresses changes in the business environment, or is primarily inward focused. For minor systems enhancement projects with no strategic objective (or even major investments that are not strategic such as year 2000 repairs), it makes sense for the plan to focus entirely on internal issues. However, to the extent that the investment is made for petitive reasons or is likely to spur a reaction from petitors, it is important to qualitatively evaluate whether the business environment will remain static and , if not, examine possible scenarios that are likely to occur. The assumption of a static business environment is a mon decision bias that can particularly plague strategic IT investments。 in particular, PC banking is a fairly well defined product innovation, while the corporate web presence is more of an infrastructure investment which is less welldefined in terms of objectives and business ownership.　　Overall, we find that while some aspects of the decision process are fairly similar across institutions and often conform to best practice as defined by previous literature, there are several areas where there is large variation in practice among the banks and between actual and theoretical best practice. Most banks have a strong and standardized project management for ongoing systems projects, and formal structures for insuring that linemanagers and systems people are in contact at the initiation of technology projects. At the same time, many banks have relatively weak processes(both formal and informal) for identifying new IT investment opportunities, allocating resources across organizational lines, and funding exploratory or infrastructure projects with long term or uncertain payoffs.　　The reminder of this paper is organized as follows. Section 2 describes the previous literature on performance of financial institutions and the effects of IT on performance. Section 3 describes the methods and data. Section 4 describes the current academic thinking on various ponents of the decision process and pares that to actual practices at the banks we visited. Section 5 describes the results of our indepth study of PC banking projects and the summary, Section 6 contains a similar analysis for the Corporate Web Site and discussion and conclusion appear in Section 7. How Financial Firms Decide on Technology(Part Three) 　　Previous Literature　　Performance of Financial Institutions　　There have been a number of studies that have examined the efficiency of the banking industry andthe role of various factors such as corporate control structure (type of board, directors, insider stock holdings, etc.), economies of scale (size), economies of scope (product breadth), and branching strategy。 loans). Given the central role that technology plays in these institutions, at least some of this variation is likely to be due to variations in the use and effectiveness of IT investments. While some authors have argued that the value of IT investment has been insignificant, particularly in services, recent empirical work has suggested that IT investment, on average, is a productive investment. Perhaps more importantly, there appears to be substantial variation across firms。SBS是一個失敗的例子，但是成功的公司也不少。How Financial Firms Decide on Technology(Abstract) The financial services industry is the major investor in information technology(IT) in the . economy。 the typical bank spends as much as 15% of nonintereste expenses on IT. A persistent finding of research into the performance of financial institutions is that performance and efficiency vary widely across institutions. Nowhere is this variability more visible than in the outes of the IT investment decisions in these institutions. This paper presents the results of an empirical investigation of IT investment decision processes in the banking industry. The purpose of this investigation is to uncover what, if anything, can be learned from the IT investment practices of banks that would help in understanding the cause of this variability in performance along with pointing toward management practices that lead to better investment decisions. Using PC banking and the development of corporate Internet sites as the case studies for this investigation, the paper reports on detailed fieldbased surveys of investment practices in several leading institutionsHow Financial Firms Decide on Technology(Part One) 信息技術(shù)對金融服務(wù)業(yè)的影響正在增加，不僅僅表現(xiàn)在銀行的15%無息開支上，而且對金融服務(wù)業(yè)的運做和戰(zhàn)略也有很強的影響。本文注重解答以下的問題： 　　？ 　　　　，理論和實際操作的結(jié)合如何？ 　　　??？ Introduction　　Information technology(IT) is increasingly critical to the operations of financial services firms. Today banks spend as much as 15% of noninterest expense on information technology. It is estimated that the industry will spend at least $ billion on IT in 1998, and financial institutions collectively account for the majority of IT investment in the . economy. In additon to being a large ponent of the cost structure, information technology has a strong influence on financial firms operatons and strategy. Few financial products and services exist that do not utilize puters at some point in the delivery process, and a firms39。 some firms