Justifying IT Projects: Connecting the Dots From Systems to Business Value

摘要

Evaluating an IT project, or making a business case for one, continues to be a difficult task. IT is used not just to reduce labor costs, but to also compete, obtain new business and increase revenues. As IT projects continue to permeate all aspects of organizations and their business processes, the benefits they yield can be multifaceted and far-reaching. Whenever an IT project is proposed, proponents always have a mental model of how its benefits arise, but that logic may be ill-formed and imprecise, making it hard to make arnbusiness case convincingly. The approach discussed in this article will improve the precision with which such mental models of benefits can be articulated and, thereby, advance the conceptual foundations and practice of IT project assessment. The method proposed here is flexible enough to be integrated into existing assessment approaches such as ROI and BSC. Thus, adopting it would not require wholesale ' changes to existing practice, which is another reason for its consideration by the practitioner community for ex ante justification of IT projects.