The great IT benefit hunt

Too narrow a focus on overcoming organisational obstacles such as financial hurdle rates can often obstruct effective evaluation of investment in information technology (IT). To clear the hurdle rates with a minimum amount of organisational disturbance, evaluation procedures are often distorted. This may mean that 'difficult to handle' benefits are deliberately excluded from consideration, with many adverse effects. In this paper, Barbara Farbey, David Targett and Frank Land focus on the need for a comprehensive search for benefits of IT investment and the placing of all those benefits firmly on the management agenda. Doing so makes it more likely that the benefits will be achieved and also brings several other advantages to the organisation. They present three models of frameworks as a basis for the search. The first is strategic, the second organisational and the third technological. In each case they have filled the frameworks with benefits of IT investment which they have recorded over several years of research, in different projects. They do not see the filled frameworks as definitive. Instead they see them as pointers to places where benefits might reasonably be looked for and a starting point for a pragmatic dialogue.