【正文】 ed 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(yùn)做和戰(zhàn)略也有很強(qiáng)的影響。SBS是一個(gè)失敗的例子，但是成功的公司也不少。 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。 response of petitors ) decision trees or other types of probability based assessment tools may simplify investment decisios. Finally, for some types of investments or decisions (for example, the decision whether to invest immediately or defer), advanced techniques such as real options can be applied.　　Although this discussion has focused primarily on evaluating the benefit part of the quantitative evaluation, there are other difficulties in estimating the cost of IT projects, particualarly those involving software development. Existing models such as COCOMO of function points estimation are known to improve the ability to predict project length, staffing requirements and total costs, although they are k own to be systmeatically off by as much as 400%. However, the accuracy of these estimates can also be improved later in the project when specifications are well defined or by customizing the models to the experience of a particular organization. However, despite the fact that these tools and approaches are readily available many firms still utilize seat of the pants estimants or lock in schedules and cost estimants before the projects are fully defined.How Financial Firms Decide on Technology(Part Six)　Approving IT Projects　　Once a project has been evaluated and a formal project proposal exists, there are a variety of mechanisms that are used to determine which projects should be funded. Most institutions have some form of mittee structure, similar to capital budgeting mittees, which is responsible for evaluating, modifying and approving projects.　　Most of the previous literature on the management of IT has focused on the socalled IT steering mittee which is an executive level group, often prised of the heads of business units or their direct reports. The objective of this mittee is to ensure that IT strategy is aligned with business unit strategy, projects are coordinated across business units where there are possible synergies and to educate the business unit managers on the both the actual activities of the IT group and the potential IT opportunities. 　MakeBuy Decisions(Outsourcing)　　At the inception of any project, a firm has the choice of whether to utilize their internal resources in the IT department (insource) or utilize an outside vendor for any or all of a project(outsourcing). While the market for outsourced services has existed since sale of the first corporate puters, the size of the outsourcing market has grown dramatically in recent years and is expected to grow substantially. In 1997 the market for information technology outsourcing has been estimated at $ billion in the . and at $90 billion worldwide. Growth estimates of