Stakeholder perceptions of IT business value in a public sector IT digitalisation project

Abstract

The IT business value concept is central to information systems. Understanding the range of meanings of IT business value in specific situations would contribute, in part, to a better knowledge of the boundaries of this concept. Current definitions for IT business value are ambiguous and considerations of IT business value tend to disregard stakeholder perceptions and other fundamental aspects of value realisation such as the value context and timeframe, and the nature of the IT artefact generating the value.
This paper presents a 4-dimensional model of the sources of IT business value and elaborates the stakeholder perception dimension by analysing IT business value as perceived by stakeholders in a single case study of an IT digitalisation project in a public sector organisation in the UK. We performed stakeholder and stakeholder salience analysis and found the following IT business values emerged: enabling organisational transformation, customer experience, cost saving, digitalisation, social service improvement, and data protection. These six values are composed of 33 sub-values. The contributions of this paper are an initial model of IT business value, a nuanced understanding of stakeholder perceptions of IT business value, and a case for the utility of stakeholder salience in evaluating IT business value