Towards an attention-based view of technology decisions

The importance of technology decisions is widely acknowledged in both research and practice. However, we know little about how companies structure technology decisions from an organizational point of view and how attention is distributed in the course of the decision process in order to identify, process, and transfer information between the organizational units involved. Using the attention-based view of the firm and 14 qualitative case studies, we present five approaches for organizing technology decisions: (1) centralized decision-making, (2) busy information bee, (3) double-blind analysis, (4) moderated expert panel, and (5) coterie approach. On this ground, this paper introduces a new, attention-based view on technology decisions, which improves the theoretical understanding of organizations and provides guidelines for practitioners in choosing an appropriate organizational configuration in this regard.