Information and Knowledge Management using ArcGIS ModelBuilder

Dawit Asmelash
Measurability of the effects: Benefits arising from IT are often described as either tangible or
intangible (Ward and Daniel, 2006).
Business outcome: IT projects have outcomes but not all outcomes result in benefits. Thus,
successfully achieving the business objectives should be distinguished as positive outcome
(Peppard, et al., 2007). The concept of “positive outcome” is one of the main characteristics of IT
benefits.
A better understanding and application of these concepts allows properly recognizing and identifying
the business benefits of an IT project. Major factors contributing to the difficulty of evaluating IT
benefits are IT reach and unidentifiable improvements (Remenyi, 2000). Benefits reside in the
changes IT has enabled in the organization. Therefore, to identify more benefits an IT initiative
produce, it is important to recognize where the intended changes are taking place and their ripple
effects in the organization.
The business benefits of IT can be grouped on the impact IT has on each typical business units of the
organization such as sales, human resources, finance, manufacturing and so forth (Andresen et al.,
2000) and they can be classified based on the level of business process or affected individuals in the
organization hierarchy and structure (Farbey et al., 1993). This enables to easily recognize and
structure the benefits (Ward and Daniel, 2006; Irani and Love, 2001). Moreover, Lindfors’ (in Dehlin
and Olofsson, 2008) modification of the DeLone and McLean’s model of information system success
categories (2002) with adjacent benefit variables, allows a deeper level of understanding to be
brought to the identification of specific benefits (Dehlin and Olofsson, 2008).
Assessing how IT meets business objectives is seen crucial for benefits identification. Thus, an
approach that renders better formulation and use of positive outcome is the area in which this
research attempts to explore.
3. The empirical research
The aim of this section is to briefly describe the research context, the study’s objectives, and the
research methodology utilized.
3.1 The context
The organization is an academic institution – one of the leading universities in Africa, with more than
40 000 IT users that include staff, customers and students. The university’s IT service department (IT
management) has proposed an “IT projects prioritization method” that is intended to be effective when
ranking and selecting IT initiatives for development. The IT project prioritization method currently used
is adopted from Gartner’s project portfolio management processes (Apfel, 2007), and Tony Murphy’s
(2002) practical guide for achieving business value, and is intended to provide an adequate basis for
IT investment decisions.
The benefits of IT are used to evaluate potential discretionary IT initiatives. The IT service department
has designed six assessment criteria perspectives to evaluate IT project benefits and to improve
judgment when selecting IT requests for development (Murphy, 2002).
The business management members in each business unit of the organization are expected to
complete the strategic alignment, business process impact, project direct payback, and institutional
risk portion of the assessment criteria. The business management, as IT requesters and evaluators
are expected to identify and define their own functional process that they expect will be improved by
the IT initiative. After identifying the business process they are expected to describe the associated
business process improvement and expected change.
However, the actual justifications from business management show that many benefits go
unrecognized or are poorly identified at the time of making a decision on the initiatives. Consequently,
there is a clear requirement for a new practical approach or set of guidelines, and this has become
the focus for the research described in the paper. More specifically, the following two research
objectives have been established:
To explore on the formation of business outcomes that can best be applied at the ex-ante
justification stage in the organization.
To provide an assessment of the effectiveness of a business outcome based method.
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