Factors Affecting the Successful Realisation of Benefits from Systems Development Projects: Findings from Three Case Studies

Abstract

The return that organisations derive from investments in information systems and technology continues to disappoint. While there is a very significant body of literature on the factors that should facilitate a successful outcome from systems development, there is growing concern that these prescriptions are not having their desired effect. In this paper, we argue that the success of a systems development project should be measured in terms of its ability to deliver meaningful benefits, rather than the timely delivery of a technical artefact, and therefore organisations should adopt an explicit and proactive benefits realisation approach when investing in IT. Consequently, we sought to explore those actionable factors that might facilitate the effective realisation of benefits from systems development initiatives. Three organisations were identified that claimed to adopt a proactive approach to benefits realisation, and detailed studies of their systems development practices were conducted. Our analysis found that whilst one organisation had been successful in its adoption of a benefits realisation perspective, the other two had not, and this allowed us to identify those factors that helped to explain this difference in outcomes. In short, this paper makes an important contribution by identifying how a subset of traditional systems success factors might be enhanced, to give them a more explicit benefits realisation orientation. Moreover, it presents a coherent set of principles that can be used for deriving other factors and practices.

Contextual Factors Influencing Health Information Systems Implementation in Public Sector – Investigating the Explanatory Power of Critical Success Factors

“…An exception from this lack of a contextual focus is presented in an article by Doherty et al [9], in which the authors claim that success in IT projects should be measured by its actual ability to deliver meaningful benefits, rather than applying factors that are said to facilitate successful outcome from IT projects. Doherty et al [9] examined actionable factors that might lead to effective realization of benefits by studying three organizations.…”

“…Doherty et al [9] examined actionable factors that might lead to effective realization of benefits by studying three organizations. Benefit realization and benefit management is a vast research field [1], [31] which we do not intend to fully explore in this paper.…”

“…Benefit realization and benefit management is a vast research field [1], [31] which we do not intend to fully explore in this paper. Instead we use the findings from Doherty et al [9] in order to investigate our case from a benefit perspective. Thus, we acknowledge the context when discussing success factors in our case.…”

“…Doherty et al's result shows that a subset of traditional CFS might be improved in order to make them more focused on benefits realization. Their contribution is also formulated in a set of coherent principles [9]: (1) Benefit orientation -Explicit focus upon delivery of benefits in the organization is needed, (2) Organizational change -Benefits primarily come from organizational change rather than directly from technology, (3) Tailor to context -Every project is unique which implies that the specific organizational context must be acknowledged, (4) Factors are interdependent constructs -Success factors are not delivering success independently of each other but have to be managed altogether, (5) Investments have a lifecycleProjects' success might be realized long after the implementation project is ended, and (6) Portfolio focus -Success factors need to be applied to an organization's all systems, not only to one individual system, in order to be actionable (ibid. ).…”

“…Despite Heeks' [13] call for studies of failures, we take a successful case as our point of departure in this paper, as we aim to compare this case and the reasons we find to explain the success with existing knowledge on CSFs. In order to focus on contextual factors, we apply a benefit perspective [9] when analyzing the case. We are not aiming to formulate CSFs from our case, as most studies of success stories do.…”