Abstract:

The productivity and profitability paradox in IT investments literature have made the work of IT managers very difficult in justifying for IT investments. Another difficult issue to grapple with by IT managers is how to measure or evaluate intangible benefits. These problems have led to the proposition of many IT evaluation frameworks/models and methods by researchers. This works aims to review a number of these frameworks/models and methods to see the way forward in this business of IT investments justification. About 40 categories/sets of research outputs or articles out of more than 50 articles reviewed were used for this work. The results showed that tangible benefits are not enough to justify for IT investments as they mostly point to corporate benefits which are short term, and that the justification of intangible benefits which are more strategic, must be included to make the justification process complete no matter how difficult it is. Again, no evaluation framework/model with its associated methods of evaluation is a panacea to the evaluation problem; evaluation depends on so many factors, and so is contextual. Also, the firm must factor into the evaluation process its corporate and strategic objectives. Lastly, in most cases, IT evaluation is seen as a must do, and therefore does not require that justification is done.

Keywords: Justify, Evaluate, Tangible, Intangible, Information Technology, Framework.

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