IT Success!: Towards a New Model for Information Technology

6.2. Monitoring costs and benefits for business (non-IT) activities

As we saw in Chapter 2, under the normal business model for non-IT activity, purchase costs normally come out of the client's pocket. Once she starts using the product or service, she will therefore monitor and measure actual costs and benefits in an attempt to verify her initial cost–benefit analysis. This could be explicit (e.g. ongoing measurements or a one-time evaluation) or implicit (e.g. 'experiencing' the product or service on a day-today basis), but as long as the initial investment represents money that could have been used for something else, a conscious effort will be made to answer the question 'Did I get a good deal out of this?'

The answer will ultimately become a pre-requisite for deciding whether to continue using it, or to stop and cut one's losses and seek alternative solutions – or, depending on the financial impact, to simply absorb the losses and chalk it up to experience.

Sometimes though, it is not always possible to back out of an investment that is not yielding the expected benefits. In the B-to-C world we can usually backtrack and sell the original goods or services (e.g. car, stock or insurance), with the resulting egg on face and hole in pocket not usually visible to others. In the B-to-B world however, things are more complex, because of a combination of the sums of money involved, undesirable external visibility, organizational politics and the operational impact of withdrawing the ...