IS strategic decision-making: A garbage can view

Developing information systems (IS) strategies and choosing the right IS portfolio for an organization require, among other things, identifying the most appropriate IS projects, determining how best to organize the IS staff, and arranging for IS procurement. All of these actions involve decisionmaking. This paper analyzes IS strategic decision-making in organizations, with the Garbage Can Model (GCM) of decision-making roviding the theoretical framework. Our findings show that IS strategic decision-making often happens through GCM processes, and while these processes are hard to control and predict, the decision quality tends to be high at the organizational level. At the individual level, however, Garbage Can processes tend to return low-quality IS strategic decisions.