An Approach to Evaluating E-Business Information Systems Projects

Capital investments in the e-business infrastructure add complexity to the IT payoff question because e-business interorganizational investments are deployed across multiple platforms, projects, vendors and partners. Traditional MIS research has been devoted to measuring the payoff from information technology (IT) investment without any specific focus on e-business. Flaws in the mature MIS performance measures seem to yield weak guidance for managers when evaluating IT success, thus diluting the potential for these measures to be adapted for use in the new e-business environment. A review of the conventional MIS payoff literature indicates that these measures may be incomplete, inaccurate, or inefficient for application to electronic commerce investments. This paper brings four new points to the e-business IT investment evaluation dialogue: (1) we first explore performance measurement validity flaws in our long established measures; (2) the paper discusses a two-by-two matrix delineating the gap between the quantitative versus qualitative performance measures of management information systems (MIS) initiatives; (3) sample e-business payoff techniques are discussed and reviewed in light of these historical imperfections, and (4) fourth, the paper proposes and describes an innovative framework derived from production theory economics for future research in evaluating e-business MIS implementations.