Towards the Formulation of a ‘Best Practice’ Framework for Benefits Realisation in IT Projects

A research project has recently been initiated, to establish the characteristics of the organisational capability required to succeed in realising benefits from IT investments. The aim of this paper is to introduce the research framework for this study and to present a progress report on the first, exploratory phase of this research, which sought to establish how explicitly and proactively benefits realisation management was conducted in a sample of recently completed IT projects. The results of the empirical research suggest that generally organisations are not adopting explicit benefits realisation programmes, there are, however, some instances where organisations are beginning to adopt a more proactive benefits orientation.