Net Benefits
As the “impacts” of IS have evolved beyond the immediate user, researchers have
suggested additional IS impact measures, such as work group impacts [18, 34], interorganizational
and industry impacts [5, 6], consumer impacts [3, 15], and societal
impacts [40]. Clearly, there is a continuum of ever-increasing entities, from individuals
to national economic accounts, which could be affected by IS activity. The choice
of where the impacts should be measured will depend on the system or systems being
evaluated and their purposes. Rather than complicate the model with more success
measures, we prefer to move in the opposite direction and group all the “impact”
measures into a single impact or benefit category called “net benefits.” Although, for
some studies, such finer granularity may be appropriate, we resisted such further
refinements for the sake of parsimony. This is discussed further in the Analysis and
Recommendations section.