Gaining a Competitive Advantage Through Benefits Management

To gain competitive advantage, organizations need to have something that the competitors do not have and cannot achieve in the short-term. In the past, organizations invested large amounts of financial resources to the finest equipment to increase competitiveness. Today, the paradigm has changed, and so the quest is more knowledge- and innovation-driven, where the answer relies on the people's capacity to create and modify processes and generate business value. The investments in information systems and technology (IS/IT) have not always generated the business value or the financial revenue that should be expected. Benefits management focuses on how business areas will improve from business changes and provides a framework for identifying, planning, monitoring, evaluating, and actively managing these benefits. In this paper, the authors show how benefits management reinforces firms to identify more clearly the path to obtain the strategic objectives and the related benefits promoting the organizational competitive advantage.