The ideas of a management-level evaluation of the EDP activities are not new. Some management consultants, public accounting firms, academicians and EDP executives have recognized the need and addressed the problem.
Though many articles and books were written to answer the issues and offered practical ideas, most of studies have continued with emphasis on specific issues in a narrow aspect-i.e., security, equipment and user interaction, etc. Integrative studies are in the stage of early development.
The objective of this study is to develop a model evaluating EDP department with special connection to the business organization in Korea.
To evaluate EDP department, 15 criteria with 50 evaluation items which were originally based on literature survey were finally selected by analyzing the responses of EDP managers of 13 firms to questionaire. Those criteria are overall management, user, organization, personnel, systems development and maintenance, equipment, access, input, processing, output, documentation, file operation, physical location and security. An evaluation model was developed with the 15 criteria. In this model, total points of 200 were distributed among those criteria. Weight for each criteria and item were derived from the data obtained by partial paired comparison and ranking method.
To check the appropriateness of the evaluation model, a correlation analysis was made to find the relationship between the rankings of EDP departments and the scores according to the model utilizing the data from Korean business organizations. The results show that there was highly significant correlation in a statistical context between the scores by the model and rankings of EDP department judged by field experts.
Special mention should be made that the criteria and evaluation items contingent to the environment and EDP growth stage of each firm may be changed.
Further studies to strengthen the model should be performed in more numbers of firms and other industries.
