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 8: Risk - project and systems
The only fence against the world is a thorough knowledge of it.
John Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693)
Risky investments may indeed carry a 'premium' reward but the existence of a precise relationship between the two cannot be demonstrated or verified as there is no objective and generally accepted method of evaluating risk.
Boyadjian and Warren (1987)
8.1 Introduction
Acquiring an understanding of the risks involved in an IT project is a central part of developing a comprehensive IT investment business case. The risk profile of the proposed IT investment needs to be clearly stated and if it is too high the IT business case should not be approved.
Risk appraisal in IT business cases has been frequently ignored and as a result many otherwise apparently sound IT business cases have actually been seriously flawed. When this happens IT projects fail.
Risk is always present in IT investments and this was well illustrated by Fortune and Peter when they described the London Ambulance Service computer disaster as follows:
The computer press is littered with examples of information technology fiasco or near disasters. An example is the computer aided dispatch system introduced into the London Ambulance Service in 1992. The 1.5 million system was bought into full use at 07:00 hours on 26 October and almost immediately began to 'lose' ambulances. During that and the next day less than 20% of ambulances reached their destinations within 15 minutes of being summoned, a very poor performance when compared with the...
Copyright MCIL 1999 under license agreement with Books24x7
