IT Investment: Making a Business Case
Shows how to present an IT project s expenses in terms of an investment in business practices and processes.
TABLE OF CONTENTS IT Investment: Making a Business Case
Chapter 2: Preparing an IT business case
The final conclusion is that we know very little, and yet it is astonishing that we know so much, and still more astonishing that so little knowledge can give us so much power.
Bertrand Russell, The ABC of Relativity (1925)
We need the courage to let go of the old world, to relinquish most of what we have cherished, to abandon our interpretations about what does and doesn't work.
Margaret Wheatley, Leadership and the New Science, (1992).
2.1 Introduction
Before embarking on the process of the preparation of the IT business case it is important to bear in mind that it is more of a corporate cultural process than a strictly technical event. As mentioned in Chapter 1, corporate culture determines of the length and the format of the IT business case, who initiates the business case and how it will be presented and processed in the organisation. Thus the first step is to establish the house rules for the IT investment business case. If IT business cases have not been generally in use then it is possible to establish ab initio the ground rules for producing them. This type of green-field situation is of course ideal, but in fact most organisations have already been using some sort of approach to producing a business case, or at least a feasibility study, or cost-benefit analysis, and it will probably be necessary to some extent to follow the precedents set up by the rules underpinning these...
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