Understanding Internal IS Customer Models of Firm Performance to Identify Potential High-Impact Projects

The CIO faces competing demands from internal customers for a variety of services, such as consulting, development, maintenance, and operations. S/he is also responsible for identifying new projects that will increase firm value. How can s/he identify potentially high-impact projects, in the face of a deluge of requests, many for politically motivated, suboptimal projects? We adapt a personal constructs theory based method, used in marketing research practice, to IS planning as the critical success chain (CSC) method. The CSC method uses knowledge distributed through the organization to develop socially constructed models of the relationships between new IS features, critical success factors (CSF), and firm goals. It uses these models to generate ideas for feasible high-impact IS projects. A case demonstrates CSC’s usefulness for (1) making practical use of knowledge distributed throughout the organization for IS planning and (2) providing rich models to better understand the needs of the IS unit's customers.