Mapping IS value across stakeholder groups: process improvement and strategic alignment, reputational effects and radical organisational change (6)

Despite decades of IS research, most returns on IS investment continue to disappoint. IS research addressed this problem by quantifying IS value in terms of its contribution to organisational performance and then prescribing frameworks to clarify this value as organisational benefits associated with IS use. Multiple organisational stakeholders are however involved in IS innovations, with different interests, power, and access to resources which cannot be easily reconciled within one single “organisational” beneficiary. Both a generic benefit framework and an approach to consider value solely as economic contribution to organisational performance obscure these differences. This research maps the outcomes of a particular IS innovation – a course visualisation tool within a large European university - across three types of stakeholders: users, developers and sponsors. The study finds that IS value varies across audiences: process improvements and strategic alignment for users, reputational effects for developers and sponsors, and radical organisational change for sponsors

Socializing the value of technology - a multi-stakeholder perspective on valuing IS

IS value research focuses on the economic understanding of value as the contribution of IS to the financial performance of the organization. This narrow understanding of value may explain why, despite decades of IS value research, most IS deployments continue to underperform. This paper adopts a valuation lens to study the realization of IS value, examining value as action (valuation). The research plans to compare the valuation actions across two similar IS (course information visualization and selection tools) in two similar organizations (large European uni-versities). The paper presents the tentative results following the analysis of one of the cases. The interim findings suggest that valuation actions are relative to alternatives and stakeholders’ needs, and as such vary significantly across different organizational actors. The findings also point to the interaction between evaluation and valorization actions, both anchored in the mate-rial features of the technology. Finally, the research unearths the role that interactions across actors play in shaping valuations of IS. The research, while in progress, suggests valuation as a useful lens to understand how IS value emerges through the intersection of material features and the dynamics of human actions