The ongoing financial and economic crisis (FEC) that started in 2007 already caused and still causes unprecedented damage for the economy worldwide. Its reasons and consequences illustrate the complex and dynamic environment in which companies act nowadays: Increasingly harmonized markets and the growing use of information technology (IT) enable companies to be part of globally connected value networks and therefore to realize quick return opportunities all over the world.The FEC definitely showed that these value networks are also risk (spreading) networks: Companies can only create sustainable value if they are able to control the associated risk. Heretofore, they took too much risk on assets they believed to understand but whose risk contribution was in fact completely unknown. Similar to a domino effect, these risks spread rapidly all over the world, not only in the financial sector. Due to a lack of equity, banks did for example not renew credit contracts of companies in production or service sectors. Their respective bankruptcy brought suppliers and customers who relied on their business partners into liquidity issues, especially, when they had problems with their own credit renewals. Although the financial services industry pulled the trigger, the problems and solutions presented in this dissertation apply to all industries: Producing and service industries highly depend on the reliability of customers, suppliers, and many of them also of resource prices.Companies better cope with such a crisis, if they are able to consistently manage those dependencies and their effects on projects as well as business processes. Crisis such as the FEC either will not happen again, or at least cause much less damage, first, if companies know their risk/return position regarding all relevant assets, second, if they know the respective interdependencies, and third, if they use their knowledge correctly.Considering the FEC, IT can be regarded as both, a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, IT may enable ad hoc collection and aggregation of information on the current risk/return position, on the other hand IT is not only a relevant risk factor itself, it even made the FEC possible in the first place. Unfortunately, there are neither IT systems available that are able to determine a company's risk position within its value network, nor sophisticated methods to measure the risk of IT itself. This dissertation therefore regards IT not only as an instrument but also as an object of risk/return management ? IT is not only an enabler, but also has to be aligned.In order to enable decision support (particularly on capital market based hedging) the risk/return-position of the company has to be determined shortly before market actions, after market actions, and ? due to dynamic markets ? on a regular basis, too (the first paper included in this dissertations describes how to determine the optimal interval of risk/return calculations). As described in the third paper, the computing capacity necessary for risk calculation can be substantial, especially in globally acting enterprises. For a complete examination, the correlation between every possible pair of (relevant) assets has to be determined. This requires IT to be able to make extensive calculations in very short time, even when examining only parts of a company's assets (see the second paper included in this dissertation). As this functionality is often required, it needs advanced algorithms and/or parallel computing. Currently "service-oriented architectures" (SOA) and especially "grid computing" (newly also labeled "cloud computing") that are in vogue in academia and practice seem to be promising concepts to solve this need for flexible and distributed utilization of IT resources.IT usually constitutes a big part of a company's cost, at the same time it bears high opportunities and risk. On the one hand, this is due to the fact that IT is widely used to support not only numerous business processes, but especially business-critical core processes of a company. On the other hand, this is due to special characteristics like irreversibility and dependencies between the different IT assets. Hence, it is necessary to design IT considering risk and return and to align it thoroughly to the company's strategy. Phrases like "death of distance" show that technology rendered globally distributed value networks possible. One central motive for many IT sourcing decisions is the high cost pressure on IT departments. On the one hand, many argue that outsourcing to IT service providers or offshoring to low-wage countries can lead to high savings on the IT budget without losses in quality. On the other hand, these decisions may also imply high risk ? especially in the IT sector. Nevertheless, well managed outsourcing at a fixed price can help optimize the risk/return position of the whole IT portfolio as described in the fourth paper included in this dissertation.
