Information Systems Benefits Research: Review and imperatives for research on ECS benefits
- Globally billions of dollars are invested on information systems and technology (IS/IT) to achieve business change. Understanding how value is generated and captured from these investments has been a key theme in information systems (IS) research for over 25 years. However, despite significant theoretical progress, organisations are still failing to achieve the full value of their investments and identifying and realising the benefits of IS/IT-enabled business change remains a challenge for both research and practice.
Our research is concerned with the business change associated with the introduction and use of new forms of enterprise collaboration system (ECS) that incorporate social software functionality (e.g. social profiles, blogs, wikis, activity streams, collaborative tagging etc). ECS represent a significant businessGlobally billions of dollars are invested on information systems and technology (IS/IT) to achieve business change. Understanding how value is generated and captured from these investments has been a key theme in information systems (IS) research for over 25 years. However, despite significant theoretical progress, organisations are still failing to achieve the full value of their investments and identifying and realising the benefits of IS/IT-enabled business change remains a challenge for both research and practice.
Our research is concerned with the business change associated with the introduction and use of new forms of enterprise collaboration system (ECS) that incorporate social software functionality (e.g. social profiles, blogs, wikis, activity streams, collaborative tagging etc). ECS represent a significant business investment; however, there remains uncertainty around the benefits and value arising from the introduction of these new types of ECS. Existing research studies on IS/IT benefits are focused primarily on traditional enterprise systems such as ERP systems. This article summarises the existing work that directly, or indirectly addresses IS benefits, to reveal four broad themes (i) evaluations of IS/IT investments (ii) measuring IS success (iii) classifying and measuring IS benefits and (iv) benefits realisation management.
The article concludes with an overview of the research on benefits management conducted in the Center for Enterpise Information Research at the University of Koblenz and the current research project investigating the benefit of enterprise collaboration systems (BECS).…

