【正文】 argue that information systems specialists should be reponsible for evalusting new technologies for business applicability since business units will generally lack the resources or the technological capability to perform these evaluations themselves. Moreover, central IT is best positioned to educate the end uses to make them good custmers of the central IT group. 　　In the banking industry, IT may be able to play an additional role in coordinating technology. Because banks and other financial firms are often managed with largely autonomous business units (for example, banks are often divided into product lines cash management, investmentor along customer segmentswholesale, mercial, retail) only the central IT function will have a perspective over the porfolio of systems projects and capabilities. One critical role in this respect is the provision and development of the shared IT infrastructure (. central processors, networks, software standards, etc.). Often these projects naturally span business units such that the only ral owner is the IT function。 see Berger, Kashyup and Scalise (1995) and Harker and Zenios (forthing) for a review of the banking efficiency literature. While there is substantial debate as to the role of these various factors, there is one unambiguous result: that most of the (in) efficiency of banks is not explained by the factors that have been considered in prior work. For example, Berger and Mester (1997) estimate that as much as 6590% of the xinefficiency remains unexplained after controlling for known drivers of performance. A similar story also appears in insurance where xefficiency varies substantially across firms when size, scope, product mix, distribution strategy and other strategic variables are considered. It has been argued that one must get inside the black box of the bank ot consider the role of organizational, strategic and technological factors that may be missed in studies that rely heavily on public financial data.　　 Information Technology and Business Value　　Early studies of the relationship between IT and productivity or other measures of performance were generally unable to determine the value of IT conclusively. Loveman (1994) and Strassmann (1990) ,using different data and analytical methods both found that the performance effects of puters were not statistically significant. Barus, Kriebel and Mukadopadhyay (1995), using the same data as Loveman, found evidence that IT improved some internal performance metrics such as inventory trunover, but could not tie these benefits to improvements in bottom line productivity. Although these studies had a number of disadvantages (small samples, noisy data ) which yielded imprecise measures of IT effects, this lack of evidence bined with equally equivocal macroeconomic ananlyses by Steven Roach (1987) implicitly formed the basis for the productivity paradox. As Robert Solow (1987) once remarked, you can see teh puter age everywhere except in the productivity statistics.　　 More recent work has found that IT investment is a substantial contributor to firm productivity, productivity growth and stock market valuation in a sample that contains a wide range of industries. Brynjolfsson and Hitt (1994,1996) and Lichtenberg (1995) found that IT investment had a positive and statistically significant contribution to firm output . Brynjolfsson and Yang (1997) found that the market valuation of IT capital was several times that of ordinary capital. Brynjolfsson and Hitt also found a strong relationship between IT and productivity growth and taht this relationship grows stronger as longer time periods are considered. Collectively ,these studies suggest that there is no productivity paradox, at least when the analysis is performed across industries using firmlevel data. The differences between these results and earlier studies is probably due to the use of data taht was recent , more prehensice ,and more disaggregated (firm level rather than industry or economy level). 　　Most previous sutdies have considered the effects of technology across firms in multiple industries, although a few studies have considered the role of technology in specifically in the banking industry. Steiner and Teixiera surveyed the banking industry and argued that while large investments in technology clearly had value,little of this value was being captured by the banks themselves。How Financial Firms Decide on Technology(Abstract) The financial services industry is the major investor in information technology(IT) in the . economy。 also they generally tend to be highly technical and thus the natural responsibility would also fall on the IT department.How Financial Firms Decide on Technology(Part Five) 　Evaluating Oppoutunities 　　Once a project is at least initially defined, there is a process by which the initial idea is converted into a proposal that can be evaluated by management for approval or rejection of funding.　　In the last ten years, it has bee more or less standard practices to develop a business case or business plan for any substantial IT investment (some small maintenance projects are simply done on request), although the content, sophistication and formality of this process varied substantially. The most typical of thes