A study of IT environment scenario through the application of cross impact analysis

Scenario analysis for strategic planning, unlike most forecasting methods, provides a qualitative, contextual description of how the present will evolve into the future. It normally tries to identify a set of possible futures, each of whose occurrence is plausible but not assured. In this paper, we propose the use of Cross Impact Analysis (CIA) approach for scenario generation about the future of Korean IT environments. In this analysis, we classified IT environments into technical, social, legislative, and economic factor. And various variables and events were defined in each factor. From the survey collected from IT related experts, we acquire probability of occurrence and compatibility estimates of every possible pairs of events as input. Then 2 phase analysis is used in order to choose events with high probability of occurrence and generate scenario. Finally, after CIA using Monte Carlo simulation, a detail scenario for 2010 was developed. This scenario drawn from the CIA approach is a result considered by cross impacts of various events.