The role of public return on investment assessment in government IT projects

This poster will present the preliminary results of a study of how public return on investment assessments and concepts are used in government IT investment decisions and developments. After decades of investments in information technology, running into billions of dollars, governments are largely unable to convincingly demonstrate a return on investment that is widely understood or based upon well-grounded measures. Nevertheless, it is clear that much in government has been dramatically changed by IT and many programs and services are believed to be more effective and less expensive as a result. Unfortunately, it remains difficult to confirm those beliefs due to the lack of a widely accepted standards or methods for public sector ROI analysis. Without such standards, governments have difficulty obtaining and using the kind of "bottom line" information that could reveal the value of IT investments across all kinds of programs and help guide new investments. These difficulties have not, however prevented many government agencies from including some public return considerations into IT investment and development decisions.