Mário Romão

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.

Information System Maturity Models in Healthcare

The use of information systems in healthcare (HIS) has been recognised as having crucial importance in improving the efficiency, cost-effectiveness, quality, and safety of medical care delivery. HIS has the potential to improve individuals’ health and providers’ performance by producing better quality, cost savings, and greater patient involvement in their own health. There have been two major drivers for the HIS investments in healthcare: 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 health delivery. Maturity models (MM) are based on the premises that people, organizations, functional areas and processes evolve through a process of development or growth towards a more advanced maturity, going through a distinct number of levels. Through a state-of-the-art review of HIS, focused on their maturity state, we identify and characterize a set of critical factors recognized as determinants in the context of HIS maturity. The article identifies a broad spectrum of MM applied to the health sector and its characteristics and reinforces the belief that the maturity of HIS can contribute to the quality of information and knowledge management in the sector.

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

TheexpensesinInformationSystemsandInformationTechnology(IS/IT)representasubstantial shareinorganizations’budgets.However,IS/ITinvestmentprojectsseemtocontinuetoshowreduced successrates.TheBenefitsManagement(BM)hasgainedrelevanceasaway,notonly,tounderstand thesefailures,butalsoasatoolavailabletoorganizationstoimprovethesuccessofIS/TIinvestments. TheobjectiveofthisarticleistounderstandhowBMcanbeappliedinIS/ITinvestmentsinthePublic Administration(PA)andhelptoleveragethebenefitsoftheseinvestments.Acasestudywasconducted usingane-GovernmentprojectinthePortuguesePA.ThestudyshowedhowaBMapproachcan beappliedinthisenvironmentandalsoidentifiedsomedifficultiesthatmustbeconsidered.Several benefits,thatwerenotforeseen,wereidentifiedandevaluated,orproposedsomecriteriafortheir evaluation,highlighting,thisway,thetruecontributionofIS/ITinvestmentsindeliveringservices tocitizensandincreasingpublicorganizationsperformance. KEywoRdS Benefits Management, Benefits Realization, e-Government, e-Government Investments, IS/IT Investments, Maturity Models, Programme Management, Project Management

Creating Intangible Value through a Corporate Employee Portal

Organizations create competitive advantage by creating more economic value than their rivals. Increasing business competition and information technology development have both led to huge corporate organizational changes and have raised the importance of intangible assets along the value chain. Value creation and the success of organizations increasingly depends on the leverage of knowledge available internally, as nowadays it has become essential to understand employee portals’ business value and to build adequate change management programmes. The Balanced Scorecard (BSC) and Strategy Map (SM) show an organization’s objectives, how they are achieved, and the link between the goals of the various sub-units and how these act together to produce the overall results. BSC and SM clarify how intangible assets are aligned with strategy, to create value for the organization. However, the concerns related to change management seem not to have been properly addressed. To conveniently deal with these matters, the authors propose a framework to map the cause-effect relationships that generates business value, as well as provides top management and decision makers with the information needed for a suitable top-down commitment and sponsorship, which is essential to bring about the appropriate change management and benefits’ realization. SM and Benefits Dependency Network (BDN) were combined, resulting in a suitable framework to help organizations enhance their knowledge, mitigating the risk of investment failure or misuse, and a timely contribution to capture more value from investments in intangible assets. The developed framework helps organizations address their concerns related to value creation and change management, and it has been applied to this Employee Portal case study. This case study allows us to conclude that, although the promotion of organizational culture and corporate alignment are not usually frequent goals of organizations, and do not motivate investments in the development of employee portals, they are generally recognised as being essential tools for decision-making and value creation.

The Balanced Scorecard: Keeping Updated and Aligned with Today´s Business Trends

Organizations are challenged to develop new organizational skills such as flexibility or expertise in order to quickly respond to changes in technology, competition and customer preferences. Companies cannot be competitive or successful if their business and information systems and technology IS/IT strategies are not strategic aligned. Nowadays, the importance of intangible assets is higher than traditional physical assets and performance measurement tools need to capture this new reality. Measuring organizational performance is a continuous challenge for both managers and researchers. Balanced scorecard BSC is a powerful tool that gives to managers a fast, but comprehensive view of the business including operational measures on customer satisfaction, organizations innovation, activities improvement, as well as financial measurements. In this paper the authors address the BSC and promote the discussion about the strengths and the limitations and pointing out new developments to overcome the today´s business trends.

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.