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 6: Strategic alignment and IT benefit identification
Strategy can be defined as the determination of the basic long-term goals and objectives of an enterprise, and the adoption of courses of action and the allocation of resources necessary for carrying out these goals.
(Chandler 1990)
Strategy pertains to a firm's plan of action that causes it to allocate its scarce resources over time to get from where it is to where it wants to go.
(Pascale 1986)
6.1 Introduction
The organisation's corporate strategy is of central importance to the effective use of IT. Strategic mismatches are a major cause of IT project failure and care needs to be taken not to fall into a trap whereby the IT investment is pulling the organisation in a different way to the overall corporate strategy. Thus the question of IT alignment is a critical aspect of the development of an IT investment business case. However the issues related to corporate strategy are not always well understood, either by users/owners or by IT practitioners. Furthermore in some organisations it is not always clear precisely what their corporate strategy is.
Having established a corporate strategy, the IT investment business case then requires the specific benefits expected from the IT investment to be listed. When this is done an assessment cam be made as to whether these benefits support the strategy or not.
6.2 Strategy? What strategy?
Before discussing the issue of strategic alignment it is important to understand the concept of strategy.
It is not a simple matter to define strategy. The...
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