Chiara Francalanci is associate professor of information systems at Politecnico di Milano. She has a master's degree in Electronic Engineering from Politecnico di Milano and received the “Dr. Leonardo Iosti” award for outstanding academic achievement and ranking 1st out of 1000 candidates for Masters in Electrical Engineering. She has a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Politecnico di Milano and a Master in Management Engineering from the Business School of Politecnico di Milano. As part of her post doctoral studies, she has worked for two years at the Harvard Business School as a Visiting Researcher where she has graduated in September 1995 in Management of the Information Systems Resource.
Her research focuses on information system engineering and, in particular, on feasibility analyses. Her main research interests in this area are information design, architectural design of information systems, and cost-benefit analyses, as fundamental components of a feasibility study.
Research on information design focuses on information and data quality and on data brokering in cooperative systems.
Research on the architectural design of information systems focuses on the cost-oriented design of hardware architectures, i.e. on the optimal selection of hardware and network components that minimize costs and satisfy performance requirements. Research on this topic has also considered complex systems based on intelligent networking technologies.
Research on cost-benefit analyses focuses on the methodological aspects of cost-benefit analyses and, in particular, on software selection and on prediction models for estimating project costs. She has authored articles on the economics of information technology and on feasibility analyses of IT projects, consulted in the financial industry, both in Europe and the U.S., and is a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Information Technology.