JUSTIFICATION OF, AND BENEFITS REALIZATION BEYOND IT INVESTMENTS: ANALYSIS FROM LITERATURE

This work looked at the justification of IT investments in general, to draw important conclusions that could be beneficial to IT project managers and professionals, and then zero in on the angle of benefits realization beyond IT investments.About 30 categories/sets of research outputs or articles out of more than 60 articles reviewed were used for this work. No primary data was employed for this work. Articles were sourced from databases such as Google Scholar, Research Gate, Academia.edu, Google search engine, Elsevier, and so on. The main themes used for the search were IT investments, Justification for IT investments, IT investments benefit determination, value creation beyond IT investments, and so on. The results showed that justification is unique to every firm, it is contextual, and so stakeholders must take into consideration environmental factors, corporate and strategic goals, experience and expertise of stakeholders, and so on, to design its framework and measures to justify IT investments. Zeroing on benefits realization, two things run through all the discussions: benefits realization of IT investments must take into consideration the organization's strategic objectives and that they do not simply emerge, as if by magic. Their realization has to be planned, delivered, reviewed, and exploited to ensure value realization on a more consistent/constant basis.