IT benefits management in financial institutions: Practices and barriers

Abstract

The adoption of Benefits Management (BM) is important to ensure that information technology (IT) projects add value to the organization; however, the literature still lacks empirical evidence about how organizations are adopting IT BM. The aim of this study is to further investigate how IT BM is adopted in Brazilian financial institutions. A multiple case study approach was implemented at four leading financial institutions in Brazil by means of interviews, document analysis and a survey of 186 IT professionals. The study identified six practices affecting the adoption of IT BM (bonuses are linked to benefits, PMO is responsible for developing an organisational BM process, Net Present Value is used for selecting projects, goals are set before approval, executive committee approves projects, benefits are measured after deployments) and seven barriers to its adoption (difficulty adopting BM in agile projects, benefits are difficult to quantify, process is slow and bureaucratic, controlling costs/benefits are non-mandatory activities, lack of knowledge of BM, difficulty using techniques, resistance to new controls), some of which are newly identified. Finally, an action plan to resolve these issues is presented.