Mapping IS value across stakeholder groups: Process improvement and strategic alignment, reputational effects and radical organisation change

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.