Jorge Vareda Gomes

The Benefits Management and Balanced Scorecard Strategy Map: How They Match

We are living in a period of enormous technological transformations and the organizations face new opportunities that the systems and information technology IS/IT implementations provide with the hope that these investments will help to increase productivity and business prosperity, meanwhile, several studies performed in public and private sectors have proven that the investments done in IS/IT have not brought the expected benefits. Some authors argue that the result of the studies that related investments in IS/IT and the increasing performance of the organizations in the last thirty years were far from true. In this paper the authors propose a link between the Benefits Dependency Network, from a Benefits Management approach, and a Strategy Map, from Balanced Scorecard, to improve the management of business benefits and to ensure that actions taken along the investment life-cycle lead to foreseen benefits realization. The goal of this integration is to build a framework that combines useful features of both methods. The authors sustain that they can be complementary. As a Strategy Map is committed with strategic alignment, communication and monitoring of strategy execution at all levels of an organization, a Benefits Dependency Network is aimed at explaining how benefits are going to be obtained through organizational change. Using the results of a case-study research, the authors explain how a Strategy Map can cross with the Benefits Dependency Network. The integrated contribution is meant to increase the investments effectiveness, giving to stakeholders the confidence on a clearer delivery path for their expected benefits.

Maturity, Benefits and Project Management Shaping Project Success

Organisations are under constant pressure. Externally, they face a scenario of intense competition, coupled with a changing environment which is full of uncertainty. Internally, organisations have to deal with limited resources, whilst at the same time comply with increasing requirements and strategic demands. A key to success is the successful management of organisational projects. According to worldwide studies, information systems and information technology (IS/IT) projects have a relatively low success rate. To face these various business challenges, the authors suggest that emphasis should be put on the integration of various and disperse management tools. By combining project management maturity models with benefits management approaches, we expect to reinforce support for the drive to use organisational projects to fulfill organisations’ strategic plans that will enhance the control techniques of project management, whilst recognising the need for organisational change and for ensuring the interpersonal skills necessary to orchestrate the successful completion of a project.

Enhancing Organisational Maturity with Benefits Management

The business challenges that some companies face require enterprise-wide solutions that call for an integrated approach and an effective management of organisational resources in order to achieve business objectives with an acceptable level of risk. A maturity model is an improvement approach which provides organisations with the essential elements for effective change. The maturity models process helps to integrate traditionally separate organisational functions, enhances goals and priorities, supplies guidance for quality processes and shares benchmarks for appraising current outcomes. The benefits management approach emerges as a complement to traditional management practices and proposes a continuous mapping of business benefits and the implementation and monitoring of intermediate results. Benefits management reinforces the distinction between project results and business benefits. Based on a case study, the authors show how a set of business objectives derived from a maturity level upgrade can be obtained from identifying, structuring and monitoring objectives and benefits. This was supported by information technology enablers and organisational changes which were all framed in an organisational maturity level that had been previously measured.

Linking Benefits to Balanced Scorecard Strategy Map

In this paper the authors propose a link between the Benefits Dependency Network, from a Benefits Management approach, and a Strategy Map, from Balanced Scorecard, to improve the management of business benefits and to ensure that actions taken along the investment life-cycle lead to foreseen benefits realization. The goal of this integration is to build a framework that combines useful features of both methods. We sustain that they can be complementary. As a Strategy Map is committed with strategic alignment, communication and monitoring of strategy execution at all levels of an organization, a Benefits Dependency Network is aimed at explaining how benefits are going to be obtained through organizational change. Using the results of a case-study research, we explain how a Strategy Map can cross with the Benefits Dependency Network. The integrated contribution is meant to increase the investments effectiveness, giving to stakeholdersthe confidence on a clearer delivery path for their expected benefits.

Balanced Scorecard: Today’s Challenges

In today’s global landscape organizations are pressured to develop new capabilities such as flexibility or expertise to respond to the ever-changing technology, competition, and customer preferences. Companies cannot be competitive or successful if their business and information systems and technology (IS/IT) strategies are not aligned. Nowadays, with the growing importance of intangible assets, performance measurement tools must be able to capture this new and important reality. Measuring organizational performance is a difficult and ongoing challenge for managers. Balanced Scorecard (BSC) is a powerful tool that gives a fast, but comprehensive view of the business including operational measures on customer satisfaction, organization’s innovation, activities improvement, as well as financial measurements. This study empirically examines how the BSC has been applied in practice and whether different BSC designs result in varying performance outcomes. In this paper the authors address the BSC and promote the discussion about the strengths and the limitations, underlining the latest developments and future research.

Investments in E-Government: A Benefit Management Case Study

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Applying Benefits Management to the Implementation of a Copy Point: A Case Study

We live in a macroeconomic period which is impacted by major technological changes. Organizations continue to invest heavily in new Information Systems and Information Technology (IS/IT) as a vehicle to increase productivity and add value to their business. Investment in IS/IT is not only acquiring technology, but above all investing in change. Difficulties in justifying investments in IS/IT are often the cause for uncertainty regarding expected benefits and are often identified as being one of the most critical management issues. In the literature, it is common to find reports about IS/IT investments that failed to achieve the expected results and benefits. Benefits Management approach (BM) tries to overcome this gap through a management process cycle that enhances the potential benefits from the planned use of IS/IT. In the authors case study, BM was applied to an IS/IT initiative that radically changed the way an internal printing process is carried out, with the added advantage of producing greater environmental and economic sustainability. This study also shows that the application of BM can contribute to increasing the degree of benefits realization and value from investments in IS/IT initiatives.

Improving the Success of IS/IT Projects in Healthcare: Benefits and Project Management Approaches

Rapid changes in the business environment are increasing the pressure on organisations to ensure the delivery of successful projects to fulfil their strategic goals. The use of emerging information systems and technology (IS/IT) has rapidly grown in several contexts, including healthcare. There have been two major drivers for the investments in Health IS/IT: the ever-increasing burden from chronic disease with costs growing significantly faster, and; the recognition of the need for greatly improved quality and safety in the delivery of healthcare. Both of these key drivers have led to very heavy investments in IS/IT in order to enable timely information-sharing for clinical decisions. The authors argue that by combining the Project Management (PM) approach with the Benefits Management (BM) approach, one can improve the current low success rate of implementations and enhance the reliability of the delivery of benefits from investments in IS/IT.

Benefits Management Enhances the Organizational Competitive Advantage

To gain competitive advantage organizations need to have something that the competitors do not have and cannot achieve in the short-term. In the past organizations invested large amounts of financial resources to the finest equipment to increase competitiveness. Today, the paradigm has changed and so the quest is more knowledge and innovation driven, where the answer relies on the people’s capacity to create and modify processes and generate business value. The investments in information systems and technology (IS/IT) have not always generated the business value or the financial revenue that should be expected. Benefits management focuses on how business areas will improve from business changes and provides a framework for identifying, planning, monitoring, evaluating and actively managing these benefits. In this paper, the authors show how benefits management reinforces firms to identify more clearly the path to obtain the strategic objectives and the related benefits promoting the organizational competitive advantage.