The Evaluation of Investments In Information Technology - Current Practices and Future Guidelines

This work depicts some reflections about the evaluation of investments in information technologies, namely corporate information systems. These projects are noteworthy because of three reasons: i) they are critical for organizations and societies, ii) they stand for about a fourth of current public and private annual investment, and iii) the performance of current evaluation schemes is doubtful, given the financial evolution of the e-businesses and the very nature of the investments. The evaluation scheme has evolved from a simple, financial based routine towards more complex approaches, most of them comprising multi-criteria and group techniques. Our reflections are an attempt to sum up the state-of-the-art and identify the main open-ended problems that should guide academic research