The Use of Benefits Management in E-Government Projects

Introduction

All organizations strive for sustainability, whether they are organizations in the public sector seeking to maximize their effectiveness or private firms looking to maximize their shareholder value. IS/IT has become instrumental in ensuring profitability and sustainability (Askedal, 2019). However, such implementation is far from straightforward, and many organizations struggle to realize the intended benefits of ICT investments (Doherty et al., 2012).

Investments in IS/IT continue to have significant and growing importance in organizations' budgets, with the average organization spending around 3.4% of its revenues (Gartner, 2015).

These investments have provided significant transformations in business and productivity gains but continue to fall short of expectations (Lin & Pervan, 2003). Almost 30 years later, the claim of the Nobel laureate in economics, Solow (1987), over the business value of IS/IT investments, what became known as the Productivity Paradox, seems to remain valid. Academics and practitioners argue that projects are a structured way to implement business change. It is thus vital that organizations ensure the success of their projects and, in this way, the success of the implementation of their strategy (Serra & Kunc, 2015). Most researchers and organizations involved in project management continue to use the iron triangle criterion to evaluate project success (Atkinson, 1999). These are execution and delivery criteria, but the post-delivery phase should also be considered and two additional success criteria must be added, such as the quality of the delivered product, and the benefits to key to stakeholders (Atkinson, 1999). DeLone & McLean (2003) redefined their initial framework to evaluate the success of an IS/IT project (DeLone & McLean, 1992) to include the net benefits as one of the six dimensions to consider in evaluating success.

According to Ward & Daniel (2006), IS/IT projects have a poor reputation in many organizations, because often these investments fail to deliver the expected benefits: 70 to 85% of IS/IT investments fail to realize the promised benefits (Ward & Daniel, 2013). The idea that technology alone would bring competitive advantages to organizations has led many of them to spend more on technology (Carr, 2003) than would be desirable, or, at least, to do so in a non-selective way (Serrano & Caldeira, 2002). Managers have felt increasing difficulty in approving their investments in IS/IT (Lin & Pervan, 2003) and also a pressure to justify and measure the contribution of these investments to the organization's performance (Lin et al., 2005). Considerable resources are wasted on projects that deliver few or no benefits (Holgeid & Jørgensen, 2020). Benefits management is a management philosophy that puts the benefits in the central point for all actors' activities in organizational change (Badewi & Shehab, 2016). According to Ward et al., (1996) the benefits management model, benefits management goes through six processes: Benefits identification, planning, implementation, execution, reviewing and exploitation. Realizing the benefits of IS/IT investments must consider the organization's strategic objectives. This means that, on the one hand, investments in modern and efficient information technology must be an integral part of the company's strategy and, on the other hand, information technology must help the company to achieve its strategic goals/objectives (Koi-Akrofi, 2020). Research has demonstrated that many programs and related projects do not achieve their potential benefits mainly because they are not aligned with organisational strategy (Badewi, 2016). Organizations can derive more benefits from IT projects when benefits are stipulated up front and are managed throughout the project's life cycle (Marnewick, 2016).