Abstract

There is no doubt anymore that Information Technology (IT) adds value to the organizations. IT value is perceived in many aspects, such as, as productivity, efficiency, effectiveness, innovation, flexibility among others. Organizations expect that IT will generate high performance capabilities, and this prospect raise issues about results and the investments made in IT, generating a need to justify such investments. Thus, measuring the benefits and value of IT is a constant concern of senior IT managers. The causality of IT value is elusive and difficult to capture. It would be necessary to identify how and where IT contributes, so we can measure that contribution, and then demonstrate the value. Since it is difficult to qualify the value that an IT asset can add to the organization when it needs to adopt some IT, the decision-making process is complex. Value is a quality generated by a personal or group, based on desire, need, utility, appreciation, importance, desirability, preferences, and is context-dependent. It could be measured in several ways and may be singular at different times. Thus, the concept of value is complex, subjective, abstract, multifaceted, individual, and has a strong qualitative bias. For a proper and comprehensive understanding of value, which encompasses all its facets and particularities, we need approaches that consider the socio-technical context. The use of traditional valuation methods, such as those based on cost, can lead to incomplete or underestimated evaluations. For this reason, qualitative approaches may take us to more comprehensive results. We aim to decompose the IT value in a set of its qualities, i.e., a set of IT value characteristic’s. We see a great similarity of these IT value characteristics with the non-functional requirements of an Information System, as they are the system’s qualities. The goal of our research is to build a model based on the Catalogue´s concept from the software engineering (Chung et al., 2012), composed by the quality characteristic’s that defines the IT value, and give prescriptions on how to implement it into some IT asset, maximizing this value. Therefore, we need to answer two research questions: (RQ1) What quality characteristics does an IT item need to have to improve the organization´s business value? And (RQ2) How to support the decision-making process of organizations when adopting IT? We argue that learning how this value is created, i.e., what elements could potentially contribute to it, would allow the organizations to be proactive in using IT to deliver business value.

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Supporting the Analysis of IT Business Value Using Catalogues

There is no doubt anymore that Information Technology (IT) adds value to the organizations. IT value is perceived in many aspects, such as, as productivity, efficiency, effectiveness, innovation, flexibility among others. Organizations expect that IT will generate high performance capabilities, and this prospect raise issues about results and the investments made in IT, generating a need to justify such investments. Thus, measuring the benefits and value of IT is a constant concern of senior IT managers. The causality of IT value is elusive and difficult to capture. It would be necessary to identify how and where IT contributes, so we can measure that contribution, and then demonstrate the value. Since it is difficult to qualify the value that an IT asset can add to the organization when it needs to adopt some IT, the decision-making process is complex. Value is a quality generated by a personal or group, based on desire, need, utility, appreciation, importance, desirability, preferences, and is context-dependent. It could be measured in several ways and may be singular at different times. Thus, the concept of value is complex, subjective, abstract, multifaceted, individual, and has a strong qualitative bias. For a proper and comprehensive understanding of value, which encompasses all its facets and particularities, we need approaches that consider the socio-technical context. The use of traditional valuation methods, such as those based on cost, can lead to incomplete or underestimated evaluations. For this reason, qualitative approaches may take us to more comprehensive results. We aim to decompose the IT value in a set of its qualities, i.e., a set of IT value characteristic’s. We see a great similarity of these IT value characteristics with the non-functional requirements of an Information System, as they are the system’s qualities. The goal of our research is to build a model based on the Catalogue´s concept from the software engineering (Chung et al., 2012), composed by the quality characteristic’s that defines the IT value, and give prescriptions on how to implement it into some IT asset, maximizing this value. Therefore, we need to answer two research questions: (RQ1) What quality characteristics does an IT item need to have to improve the organization´s business value? And (RQ2) How to support the decision-making process of organizations when adopting IT? We argue that learning how this value is created, i.e., what elements could potentially contribute to it, would allow the organizations to be proactive in using IT to deliver business value.