Evaluating IT benefits through modeling the organization

Large information technology (IT) investments in an industrial context are made with the incentive that they will lead to monetary benefits for the organization. Earlier research has shown that these benefits are not easy to measure when evaluating the investment, and they may not always have been realized by the time the evaluation is taking place. Organizations have often identified business specific, intermediary goals that are not quantifiable in them selves but believed to lead to monetary benefits eventually. These qualitative business goals, such as higher employee satisfaction or better information for decision making etc, need to be part of the evaluation of IT to give a more complete evaluation of the IT investment. This paper suggests a quantitative method of evaluating IT investments by modeling the organizational changes new IT systems bring and the intermediary, business specific goals that are affected. The modeling language is based on a metamodel. The constructs of the metamodel and how to use them for tracing changes in business value will be explained. Since different kind of organizations have different goals and needs, the modeling language has to be adapted to suit the specific organization and its goals, and this paper presents how it could be defined for one organization. The method has been used to evaluate an IT investment to support the maintenance management process at a Swedish nuclear power plant. The general method and modeling language used for modeling are presented, and then adjusted to suit the organization of interest.