I am delighted to be awarded Paper of the Year from Business Information Review (BIR) for my 2013 effort on aligning IT project spend with business alignment. BIR have been kind enough to make the article available for free via their publisher’s website, which you can find here. In the paper, which I wrote with teammates of mine from the IT team at Tullow Oil*, we highlight the importance of allowing people’s judgement back into the equation when considering IT project Return on Investment. I think this is one of the most important implications of Peter Drucker’s writings on the knowledge worker and the knowledge economy. Essentially, there is value to be gained by trusting the judgement of the experts you hire and in building systems that allow them to influence business decisions.
It is folly to chase a scientific calculation of return on investment too far, particularly in the IT world. IT is changing so fast with risks and opportunities not only appearing and disappearing at lightning speed, but also often switching places suddenly. Perhaps ironically, in the incredibly fluid world of IT, human judgement is critical with every step.
The paper led me to a series of conversations with the project management team at PA Consulting here in London and in those conversations we talked about the importance of human judgement in the context of project benefit realisation. Some business benefits can be measured directly, such as when an IT project automates a previously manual and time consuming process. But other projects deliver systems which are designed to improve decision making. Sometimes this can be incredibly hard to observe directly and quantify. But it’s easy to simply trust your experts and ask them the question: does this system make your decision making better? If you’ve spent a load of money recruiting and hiring these people, surely their subjective opinions are worth something? You can see a write up here reflecting one of the conversations we had in which the consensus was that you absolutely should accept subjective input as at least part of the overall benefits-realised assessment.
*It's important to note that the opinions and attitudes expressed in this blog are my own and do not reflect the views and opinions of Tullow Oil.
*It's important to note that the opinions and attitudes expressed in this blog are my own and do not reflect the views and opinions of Tullow Oil.
