Understanding the Complexity of Benefits Management in an Interorganizational eHealth Effort

Information and communication technology (ICT) is an intervention for the future provision of healthcare services and diverse types of technologies are being implemented. However, realizing the benefits of such efforts is challenging. Moreover, collaboration among organizations has become common, which increases the complexity level and making the benefits of ICT efforts even more challenging to realize. As benefits management (BM) practices have not been designed for complex situations, a deeper contextual understanding of BM practices is required. To address this issue, a case study was conducted in a Norwegian interorganizational eHealth effort. The results provide an overview of four central concepts describing interorganizational complexity, as well as organizational and external concepts that challenge current BM practices. The case study findings highlight the need for updated BM practices and provides three novel suggestions for improving BM practices in interorganizational eHealth efforts

Enhancing the Benefits Management Model for Complex eHealth Efforts

This thesis suggests five ways to improve BM in complex eHealth efforts. First, the concept of BR was defined to clarify the existing conflation of the BR and BM concepts. Second, an extended and enhanced BMM was developed that incorporated the BM context, levels of complexity for both organizational and interorganizational initiatives, and the critical aspects of learning and governance. Third, three propositions concerning learning and governance in BM were suggested based on the new model, which can be used to inform future BM studies and guide empirical work. Fourth, the propositions were further translated into a six-question checklist to stimulate learning from the BM process itself. Finally, I provide suggestions for BM governance in interorganizational ICT efforts aiming to realize societal benefits.publishedVersio