Willcocks and Lester (1993) looked at 50 organizations drawn from a cross-section
of private and public sector manufacturing and services. Subsequently this research was
extended into a follow-up interview programme. Some of the consolidated results
are recorded in what follows. We found all organizations completing evaluation at
the feasibility stage, though there was a fall off in the extent to which evaluation was
carried out at later stages. This means that considerable weight falls on getting the
feasibility evaluation right. High levels of satisfaction with evaluation methods were
recorded. However, those perceptions need to be qualified by the fact that only 8%
of organizations measured the impact of the evaluation, that is, could tell us whether
the IT investment subsequently achieved a higher or lower return than other non-IT
investments. Additionally there emerged a range of inadequacies in evaluation practice
at the feasibility stage of projects. The most common are shown in Figure 9.4.