The management of change for information systems evaluation practice: experience from a case study

Most of today's cost-driven, project evaluation methodologies and accountancy frameworks fail to take into account the intangible benefits and associated risks, and cannot reflect the infrastructural nature of modern information system (IS) This paper argues that an interpretivist framework is initially needed to understand and study the IS evaluation process. The emphasis here is on describing and analysing processes of change regarding information technology (IT) appraisal practices in context, illustrating why and how their content and the strategies for introducing them can be constrained and/or enabled by features of the organizational context. In these terms, this paper analyses the case of a UK insurance organization where the need for a rigourous IT appraisal methodology initiated a 12-month project to design and develop such a method and a series of supporting tools. The paper examines the use the evolution of the methodology over the past two years.