TABLE OF CONTENTS Expenditures on IT capital were less effective than any other type of expenditure considered. The reason is that firms focus too much on how technology is used instead of what it is used for.
D. Schnitt, Re-engineering the organisation using information technology, Journal of Systems Management, January 1993
There is an implicit assumption in most of the ICT evaluation research literature that while ICT benefits may sometimes be difficult to estimate, calculating ICT costs is straightforward. This assumption is implicit in the remarkable paucity of discussion within the literature of how such costs are measured. This may be because many ICT researchers are unaware just how complex ICT costing is or it may be that they consider it to be an accounting problem and thus the concern of others. However, ICT costing is far from straightforward. Even experienced cost accountants are frequently frustrated by the problems they face when it comes to recording and computing the cost of ICT. How to account for costs is often a question of interpretation and organizational politics and, on occasion, can be more of an art than a science.
From an evaluation perspective, a further complication is the fact that cost may be seen through the lens of the accountant or the economist and there are significant differences between these two mindsets. In general, cost accountants accumulate data in order to be able to determine what was actually paid to achieve a specific objective. An economist, or a manager taking...
