General characteristics and common practices for ICT projects: Evaluation perspective

Abstract

In today's business world, organizations are more dependent on Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) resources. Cloud services, communication services and software services are most common resources, enterprises are spending large amount. To install new services and upgrade existing services, ICT project are essential part of organization's business strategies. Researchers highlighted the real problem for the organization is to initiate new ICT projects and its evaluation after implementation. This research investigated the common approaches organizations using to start with ICT projects and how to evaluate its impact on after implementation. For this, we have extracted the number of steps with the help of literature review. To validate those steps, six case studies are selected for collecting the samples. The findings of this study elaborate that every ICT project has list of objectives i.e. strategic, informational, IT infrastructure and others. Furthermore, the results highlight that organizations believe on both financial and non-financial evaluation methods based on the type of organization i.e. public or private. Moreover, measurement process applied on project wise, monthly and yearly bases. Importantly, we have found that currently outsourcing plays significant role in success of ICT projects. The results of this study can be helpful for the organization to understand the type of ICT investments, approaches and possible impact on the organizations goals.