Abstract

Information and Communication Technology (ICT) needs considerable financial resources. In fact, the ICT environment in developing countries is different from that of the developed countries in many aspects. These differences make the impact of an ICT project failure more harmful than that of a developed country especially at the economic level where financial resources are limited. Organizations in developing countries that attempt ICT transfer often face severe obstacles that hinder their ability to achieve payback from their investment. To understand why this happens requires an investigation into the dynamics between each organization and its environmental context and how that translates into systems that are less than useful. The purpose of this paper is to make the case that ICT payback is difficult to achieve in developing nations unless careful attention is paid to alignment issues in the process of technology transfer, especially issues related to the impact of the environment on alignment. In this paper we present an ICT payback model for developing nations from managers’ perspective and then validate it as useful in two ways: that it can be used to explain mismanagement of ICT in developing nations and in its use for the prevention and correction of problems in ICT projects. The model can be very useful for explaining why technology transfer efforts often fail. We developed the ICT management context payback model after extending the integration of previous research on alignment and payback failure, by adding new factors extracted from case studies in developing countries.

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