A Balanced Scorecard approach in evaluating IT projects in the public sector

Abstract

Malaysian public sector is highly encouraged to utilize IT to improve their public services delivery to the public. Therefore, numerous IT projects have been approved and funded under several Malaysian National Plans. As the success of the existing or current IT projects in public sector are not properly evaluated has resulted in the same failures due to non-existence of a specific guideline, method or tool that can be used by public sector to evaluate their IT projects. This research aims at investigating the practice of IT project evaluation among the public sector agencies and analyzes how Malaysian public agencies evaluate their IT projects success or failure. A case study was conducted at one of the ministry as to seek data and information pertaining to the current practice of Malaysian government agencies in handling IT project evaluations. As anticipated, many project managers in public sector did not conduct IT projects evaluations. If it were conducted, most of the evaluations conducted improperly. The reasons why IT projects evaluation were not conducted properly were mainly because of the project managers did not have formal training and experience on IT projects evaluation and have not enough personnel to conduct IT projects evaluation. An IT project evaluation guideline has been developed, based on Balanced Scorecard and weighted scoring model, as a reference and guidance on conducting IT project evaluation.