Estimating Benefits of Enterprise Information Portals: Concepts, Methodology, and Tools

Enterprise information portal benefits and corporate goals How are various claimed EIP benefits related to corporate goals, business processes , and to IT applications? Most discussions of EIP benefits and, for that matter , of benefits of other software alternatives to EIPs, are not tightly coupled to corporate goals and business processes (see Chapter 3). In the EIP literature the discussion of benefits thus far has not approached a systematic analysis of corporate goals, objectives, and benefits in the context of IT alternatives. Instead, in most analyses there is an ad hoc listing of envisioned outcomes or effects of the introduction of EIP software and an assertion that these outcomes are unequivocal benefits. The approach is basically intuitive rather than analytical and comprehensive. It doesn' t clarify the relationship of the claimed or envisioned outcomes to corporate goals or business processes. And it often doesn' t distinguish the outcomes in terms of the degree of benefit they provide. This chapter presents concepts, methodology, and tools for producing improved EIP benefit estimates. My objective is to provide a framework for thinking about a more comprehensive estimation of EIP benefits—an estimation that is tightly coupled to corporate goals and that distinguishes benefits according to their relative importance. I will not propose a specific methodology for estimation in all situations, because, as we will see, no single methodology is appropriate for every corporate situation. Comprehensive benefit estimation is not practical in many situations. In others, varying degrees of comprehensiveness will be appropriate. Instead of a single methodology, I will define an abstract pattern of comprehensive benefit estimation (CBE) that would, if implemented, achieve the goal of tight coupling of benefits, goals, and software alternatives. Then I will point out how in different concrete situations one may tailor the pattern to achieve a feasible estimation procedure.