Have You Taken your Guys on the Journey?: An ANT Account of Information Systems Project Evaluation

Pre-investment evaluation of information system (IS) project proposals persists to be problematic and highly risky in practice. Numerous evaluation approaches and methodologies offered in the literature have not contributed to major improvements in practice. We propose here a radical departure from the dominant conceptions in IS evaluation literature by adopting Actor-Network Theory (ANT) to provide a better understanding of the evaluation of IS proposals in practice and examine the ways in which the evaluation process shapes and ensures the selection of the best IS projects. By drawing on a field study of the IS evaluation processes in a company with a history of IS successes, we reveal the relational nature of IS project proposals and the ways they are constitutively entangled with business processes and practices. We demonstrate how the practice of IS evaluation produces the ‘object’ it evaluates, and how the IS project proposal is produced as a focal actor by relations in the actor-network emerging around it.