We extend critical success factors (CSF) methodology to facilitate participation by many people within and around the organization for information systems (IS) planning. The resulting new methodology, called "critical success chains" (CSC), extends CSF to explicitly model the relationships between IS attributes, CSF, and organizational goals. Its use is expected to help managers to (1) consider a wider range of development ideas, (2) better balance important strategic, tactical, and operational systems in the development portfolio, (3) consider the full range of options to accomplish desired objectives, and (4) better optimize the allocation of resources for maintenance and small systems. We trace the development of CSF and make the case for extending it. In two case studies, one at Rutgers University and another at Digia, Inc., we demonstrate the use of CSC in planning. At Rutgers, we use CSC to observe employees' preferences for new systems features, to model the reasons why they think that the features are important to the firm, and to generate strategic IS project proposal ideas. At Digia, we use CSC to generate ideas for new financial services applications based on mobile communications technology for which Digia would be a part of the value chain. From our experience in the case studies, we define a practical procedure for data gathering and analysis to uncover and model CSC in the firm and to generate ideas for important IS projects.
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