Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
the benefits of a particular IT investment,
bringing deep understanding of the busi-
ness value that IT investments can provoke.
hensive control framework for IT governance,
by focusing on the investment decision and the
realization of benefits parts. On the other hand,
COBIT is responsible for the execution part of
the IT governance framework (Symons, 2007).
The Val IT advantages are (Symons, 2007):
Having the benefit of hindsight, this ap-
proach gives CIOs and executives the op-
portunity to make consistent and appropri-
ate investment choices.
If the organization embraces this meth-
odology, the business and IT will become
aligned.
Active value management.
Initiatives evaluation is not too narrow,
as Val IT business cases have to be very
detailed and continually updated through-
out the life cycle of an investment, so as
to support the ongoing implementation and
execution of a project.
And the disadvantages of the benefits manage-
ment approach are (Ward & Daniel, 2005):
It is a process and has to be used in its full
extension so as to be effective.
And, the Val IT disadvantages are (Symons,
2007):
Requires an organization to fully adapt to
the benefits management process which
can cause organizational resistance, and
the learning curve is also an issue.
Despite the availability of guidelines and
case studies, few CIOs have adopted Val
IT so far.
Many organizations have difficulties to de-
fine all the benefits.
Governance practices like reporting are
very difficult to implement.
Requires specialists to make this approach
fit with the organization.
Val IT requires a mature IT governance
framework already in place.
To put it briefly, the benefits management pro-
cess enables organizations to avoid benefits 'loss'
and increases the number of benefits achieved
by IS/IT projects. However, it is hard to change
employees' attitude to embrace the benefits man-
agement “mindset”.
comparison
Both Val IT and benefits management approaches
have a longer learning curve than general invest-
ment analyses. However, they have the advantage
of being comprehensive processes and realizing
both tangible and intangible benefits. Therefore,
they can bring more long-term added value to the
organization when comparing to general invest-
ment analyses, although organizational resistance
can become a tough barrier to overcome.
On the other hand, considering the current
financial crisis and, consequently, the IT budget
cuts, it is more than ever necessary to economically
justify IT investments using financial metrics.
Independent of which approach is chosen,
each ITIL process has its own list of tangible and
intangible benefits specified in one of the five
Val IT
The purpose of the Val IT and the benefits man-
agement approaches are similar as both were
designed to monitor IT investments.
The Val IT is a governance framework that
consists of a set of guiding principles that pro-
vide CIOs with sufficient know-how to correctly
manage IT investments, so as to generate as much
value as possible from IT investments. In fact, the
Val IT framework extends and complements the
COBIT framework, which provides a compre-
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