The return that organisations derive from investments in information systems and technology continues to disappoint. While there is a very significant body of literature on the factors that should facilitate a successful outcome from systems development, there is growing concern that these prescriptions are not having their desired effect. In this paper, we argue that the success of a systems development project should be measured in terms of its ability to deliver meaningful benefits, rather than the timely delivery of a technical artefact, and therefore organisations should adopt an explicit and proactive benefits realisation approach when investing in IT. Consequently, we sought to explore those actionable factors that might facilitate the effective realisation of benefits from systems development initiatives. Three organisations were identified that claimed to adopt a proactive approach to benefits realisation, and detailed studies of their systems development practices were conducted. Our analysis found that whilst one organisation had been successful in its adoption of a benefits realisation perspective, the other two had not, and this allowed us to identify those factors that helped to explain this difference in outcomes. In short, this paper makes an important contribution by identifying how a subset of traditional systems success factors might be enhanced, to give them a more explicit benefits realisation orientation. Moreover, it presents a coherent set of principles that can be used for deriving other factors and practices.
Further information on publisher's website:http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j. 1467-8551.2008.00640.x Publisher's copyright statement:The denitive version is available at www.interscience.wiley.com Additional information:
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Many SMEs have been slow to exploit the potential of e-business. However, it can be difficult for any firm to gain value from e-business, and particularly so for SMEs that may lack important information technology (IT) competences. The study focused on one SME which had undertaken a series of e-business initiatives over a period of 10 years. The analysis revealed that the firm used e-business in two different ways: e-business for innovation, and e-business for integrating business processes. Four IT competences were found to be particularly important to the firm's developments: IT leadership, business systems thinking, architecture planning, and making technology work. The study provides a detailed understanding of how the firm used e-business to gain value and how its IT competences influenced its e-business developments. The study also shows that a lack of competence in some areas inhibited the firm's e-business developments.
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