Min-Seok Pang
Assistant Professor, Management Information Systems
Temple University
Friday, Nov 21, 2014
10:00am – 11:30am Speakman Hall 200
Seminar Title: IT Is All About Politics – Information Technology Investments in the U.S. Federal Government in 2003-2015
Abstract
Does politics matter to information technology (IT) investments in the U.S. federal government? This study investigates how the national politics affects IT investment profiles in U.S. federal agencies. Drawing upon various theories from the political sciences and information systems (IS) literature, we hypothesize that a federal agency makes more capacity-building IT investments and spend less in IT maintenance (i) when it performs homogeneous functions, (ii) when its head is confirmed by the U.S. Senate, (iii) when the Congress is controlled by the President’s ruling party, and (iv) when the agency is neither too conservative nor too liberal. We also propose that the impact of agency ideology on IT investment profiles strengthens when the Congress is controlled by the opposition party. With a panel dataset from 133 federal agencies and bureaus in 2003-2015, our empirical analyses support all of our hypotheses and produce several intriguing findings. For instance, when both the Senate and the House of Representatives are controlled by the ruling party, federal agencies are predicted to invest approximately $5%-point more in new IT development and modernization than when the opposition party holds the majority in both chambers. We contribute to the IS literature in two fronts. We study IT investments profiles in the U.S. federal government, which consumes more than $75 billion of tax revenues for IT annually yet has received scant attention by IS researchers. We also examine what affects budget allocation decisions between IT development and maintenance, which to the best of our knowledge, few IS studies have studied so far.