Understanding and supporting information systems evaluation

The evaluation of information systems is an area of increasing concern to organizations as these systems become more central to the organization and high levels of investment in IT show no signs of falling. However, evaluation is a complex tangle of financial, organizational and tchnical threads, many of which are currently either avoided or dealt with ineffectively by organizations. The paper argues that considerable benefit could be gained by the provision of computer-based support, in the form of an evaluation workbench. In order to provide a conceptual basis to approach the complexities of evaluation, the paper discusses a conceptual framework, based on the content, process and context of evaluation. This framework is used to classify the evaluation activities and to discuss the benefits of the proposed workbench.