The realisation of Benefits from IT Projects: Does Practice makes Perfect?

There is growing agreement that the potential benefits of implementing business technologies will not be realised through the relatively simple act of going live with a new software application. Indeed, there is clear evidence that organisations must explicitly plan for, and proactively manage, the realisation of benefits, if a new technology is to deliver real value to its host organisation. In particular, benefits need to be leveraged through carefully planned and co-ordinated programmes of organisational change, and on-going organisational adaptation. Inevitably these insights have encouraged academics, consultants and practitioners to develop tools and techniques to explicitly support the benefits realisation process. In this paper, we argue that the adoption of any such prescription, tools or panacea is unlikely to be sufficient, as benefits typically arise from the complex interplay between systems, people, contexts and processes, often over significant time-frames. We show, through the use of a public sector case study, that a more robust and effective solution to benefits realisation problem is likely to arise from the development of a capability to support the realisation of benefits, composed of practices, and we then question as to whether it‟s enacted through craftsmen.