How to Develop a Case Study

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Your problem seemed fairly broad, so I've worked up an example case study in the field of Information Technology. If your assignment calls for something in a different field, the attached essay should serve as something as a roadmap in adapting to your desired subject. Here is the process I followed:

1- Identify a general subject/question to address: "Are IT costs relevant as investment, or merely overhead?"

2- Find a few peer-reviewed articles on the subject. I searched for "IT as investment" on Proquest and Ebscohost... but the specific search engine isn't important. The REFERENCES page of several of these articles directed me to more works regarding more general theory on the subject.

3- After sorting through a few of those articles, I formed an opinion to defend: "IT can be considered investment if projects are planned correctly."

4- I searched the internet for popular news stories covering the subject, and selected a story that had both enough background information readily available, as well as addressed the question from #1 above.

Example Case Study:

Too often, the individual elements of an organization work towards disparate ends-if not actively at odds with, then at least irrelevant to each other. In the current business climate, there is not enough profit to support opposing empires within a single company. Indeed, a house divided against itself cannot stand. For this reason, never has it been more important for leadership to ensure a common business strategy-and given that strategy, to further define how the nervous system of a company will operate through a coherent and complimentary information technology (IT) strategy.

The term "strategy" has become something of a platitude in modern language. Without reviewing or lamenting how this came to be, suffice it to state a strategy "takes a vision or objective and bounds the options for attaining it," (Gartner, 2002, p.7). A business strategy articulates the vision and defines the objective of a company. While true it also describes the boundaries in accomplishing those objectives, it should do so very broadly. The majority of that ...