Assessing IT Business Value using Catalogues

Abstract

Organizations make large investments in IT, so the value added to the business needs to be understood in order to justify such investments. The IT business value concept is complex, multifaceted, with a certain level of abstraction and intangibility, and with effects that may only be observed after a long period of the technology deployment Although the IT business value theme is yet indubitably relevant, as our literature review has shown, there is still a gap in the existent models, i.e., there is no proposition that addresses all tangible and intangible IT business value facets, able to estimate it. Therefore, we propose a comprehensive qualitative model, whose goal is to represent and organize all value characteristics that an IT initiative may create in an organization, helping to justify investments and even making it possible to compare the aggregated value of different technology options in a selection process. This model organizes the characteristics that contribute to the IT business value, evidencing their relationships and offering high-level prescriptions on how organizations can implement these characteristics in their context when adopting information technologies. We used the idea of Catalogues from Software Engineering to represent this model, and built it based on 84 research papers, providing 58 IT business value characteristics. We claim that the proposed Catalogue contributes to the IT Business Value research, as well as being itself a technological contribution. The Catalogue can support the organizations to better understand the impact of their IT initiatives and justify IT investments.