IT Evaluation Revisited: Plus ca Change

摘要

We began this study by noting that organizations are spending so much money on IT that senior managers must feel compelled to ensure that their investments in IT are well spent. The three categories of benefit they need to evaluate are: (1) benefits from their overall portfolio of IT investments, (2) benefits from investments in specific IT projects and applications, and (3) the performance of their IT function. With respect to benefits from a firm's overall portfolio of IT investments, the senior IT managers who responded to our survey thought their overall IT evaluation processes for evaluating IT operations, IT infrastructure investment, service to the business, and IT support were, on average, "quite successful". Although the value of new techniques such as balanced IT scorecards and benchmarking was unclear, roughly 30% of firms had introduced these new methods of IT evaluation in the last two years. In addition, seventy percent of responding firms outsourced at least some of their IT service provision (averaging 24% of the IT budget outsourced) and over 90% of them claimed they could evaluate the level of outsourcing success against their original reasons for outsourcing. With respect to individual projects, although only 50% of projects were the subject of formal post-implementation review, two thirds of projects were perceived to be "meeting" or "exceeding" expected benefits. On the other hand, about ten percent of projects were being abandoned, primarily because of changes in user and business requirements. Consistent with Ballantine et al. (1999), our respondents report that only about 70% of projects are subject to formal feasibility studies and formal on-going project review.