DEVELOPMENT OF MEASURES TO ASSESS DIMENSIONS OF IS OPERATION TRANSACTIONS

Information Systems (IS) researchers often rely on Organization Econom ics models to describe and explain various IS management issues. While those models are found to be useful, measures are yet to be proposed to assess the dimensions of IS transactions. In this paper we present the results of a study that was a first effort toward this end. The fo cus of the study was on one type of transaction, IS operations, in a p articular management context, that of outsourcing. Measures Here devel oped for four critical dimensions of IS operation transactions: asset specificity, measurement problem, origin of the most important investm ent, and governance mechanism. Data from 250 large Canadian firms were used to assess the measures, using the partial least squares techniqu e. Copyright (C) 1996 Elsevier Science Ltd.