ROI Analysis in e-Government Assessment Trials: The Case of Sistema Piemonte

Assessing the returns of public investments in information and communication technologies (ICT) poses important practical and research challenges. Scholars and practitioners that have embarked in ICT assessment activities have encountered many difficulties which, to a large extent, have remained pending issues. This paper reviews the exiting literature on public return on investment (ROI) and presents an assessment conducted on an Italian circuit of eGovernment services. The paper intends to share the experience gained from our study with the rest of research community. Also, it proposes a perspective on public ROI that differs from a strictly bottom line approach to stimulate a debate on the role of such evaluation activities in the process of eGovernment implementation.