【正文】 evaluate the idea for technical feasibility and develop a project proposal include an initial determination of resource needs, cost, and delivery time. While this makes effective use of IT personnel in evaluating particular ideas, it provides only a limited role for IT personnel to aid in the identification of technologybased business opportunities. 　　For that reason, some authors have suggested that the IT function should play a larger role in the identification of technological opportunities. For example, Davenport and Short (1990) emphasize that IT capabilities should inform business needs as well as the business units placing demandson the IT function. Fockart, Earl and Ross and Boynton, Jacobs and Zmud identify the role of technology scanning and technology education as an important ponent of a centralized IT department。 they 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。 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 these project proposals (assuming a midsize to large project) take the form of a business plan which includes a qualitiative description of the objectives, petitive environment, a description of the opportunity and, in some cases, an implementation plan. While the form of these plans varies widely, 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。 Clemens (1991) terms this the trap of the vanishing status quo.　　For the quantative financial evaluation, most IT evaluation methods have their roots in traditional capital budgeting procedures such as discounted cash flow analysis(DCF). However, while these techniques can work well for projects where costs and benefits ar well defined (. purchasing offthe shelf software in pursuit of operational cost savings), it is increasingly recognized that simple application of DCF approaches is not sufficient for IT investments. This is because much of the value of modern IT investments is likely to be difficult to quantify such as revenue enhancements or cost savings through improved customer service, product variety, or timeliness. One monly used stategy is to value nonquantifiable benefits at zero, although this strategy will systematically bias project evaluations to unnecessarily reject projects. 　　Recognizing the limitation of the DCF approach, several alternative approaches have been proposed. One method is to base tghe case entirely on qualitative analysis。 unfortunately, this approach often leads to hightly subjective judgements and is likely to err on the side of accepting bad projects. Kaplan, recognizing this problem in the context of evaluating puter integrated manufacturing (CIM), proposed using a variant of DCF。 a firm calculates the present value of the investment using all the ponents that can be quantified and then pares this prliminary value to the qualitative list of other benefits and costs. In other ca