Measuring the Impact of Information Technology on Value and Productivity using a Process-Based Approach: The case for RFID Technologies

There has been a lot of research addressing the relationship between Information Technology (IT) investments and productivity. Most of the work has been based on firm-level metrics such as total IT investment. We present what we believe is one of the first attempts to create a systematic methodology to assess the impact of IT in business process performance metrics. Our approach builds on the MIT Process Handbook as a basis to both guide the analysis and capture the resulting knowledge for future use. We will present preliminary results on how to use such methodology to analyze the impact of a given IT technology, namely RFID (radio frequency identification devices), in performance metrics of a consumer packaged goods company. We are interested in looking at how IT may impact performance metrics such as productivity, cost and value. We believe our methodology can help CPG companies prioritize their investments. We show results on how the specialization features of the MIT Process Handbook can incorporate performance metrics to help assess such investments in RFID.