Presently, there is much focus on measuring and improving the quality of industrial systems with little attention paid to the quality of information technology (IT) related systems. In this paper, we present a study using the technique quality function deployment (QFD) to design and improve IT systems. QFD is a useful technique and has been applied successfully in traditional hardware product design. We show that it is equally useful for the design of IT‐related systems. In particular, we used QFD to study the human/user interface aspects of several World WideWeb home pages. On‐line surveys were used to obtain rankings of customer voices that are important in QFD. The results show that it is a useful technique that should be more commonly used for IT‐related systems.

This study extends Weill's (Do computers payow ? A study of information technology investments and manufacturing performance. Washington, DC: International Center for Information Technologies, Information Systems Research, 3(4), 307}333) work by categorizing IT investment into four types of management objectives: transactional, strategic, informational and threshold. The relationships between these management objectives and "rm's role (de"ned in terms of traditional, evolving and strategic) are investigated through a questionnaire survey of managers in the service sector. As expected, "rms adopting a traditional role seem to favor investment in transactional IT. However, there appears to be an increasing emphasis on strategic IT investment for all three types of "rms, regardless of the role of IT. Implications of the results are discussed.

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