Overview

[This] involves the acceptance that evaluation is:

1. a management process requiring discipline;

2. comprehensive, involving the opinions of all the major stakeholders as informed project partners;

3. focused on a full range of benefits or outcomes which include financial and direct business benefits, both tangible and intangible;

4. most effective when it is performed regularly perhaps even continuously;

5. not critical of change but rather sympathetic to it, encouraging full discussion of co-evolving requirements;

6. required to ensure that the object or process being evaluated continues to be relevant.

D. Remenyi, M. Sherwood-Smith with T. White, Achieving Maximum Value from Information Systems (1997)

15.1 Introduction

It is not an easy task to measure or manage IT costs and benefits. Many of the problems or challenges associated with this task have been spelt out in some detail in earlier chapters in this book. Some of the challenges are philosophical, such as those that relate to operationalizing the meaning of value, ^[1] and some are practical, such as those involving the quantification of certain types of benefits. It is interesting how the question of the struggle for the meaning of value reoccurs so frequently in the IT evaluation literature. Bannister and Remenyi (2000) point out:

It is argued that a weakness in much of the current research is the fact that the definition of value is usually unclear, frequently inadequate, often partisan and sometimes completely absent from the discussion. Until there is a better understanding in...