A Literature Review of Benefit Analysis Approaches for IT Projects in
the Public Sector
Oscar Avila
1
, Sebastian Sastoque
1
and Orlando Cuevas
2
1
Department of Systems and Computing Engineering, School of Engineering, Universidad de los Andes, Bogota, Colombia
2
CIFI - Informatica, Universidad de los Andes, Bogota, Colombia
Keywords:
Value Generation, Gain Analysis, IT Project Management, State Entity, IT Service, Public Service.
Abstract:
The financial investments of public institutions in Information Technology (IT) projects have considerably
increased in recent years. This has resulted in an enormous pressure on IT managers of these institutions
to find ways to analyse the benefits of these investments. However, this task is very difficult because, in
the public sector, IT projects do not only generate financial benefits but also create public value through the
generation of other types of benefits, such as social and political. In addition, in this sector there is a variety
of beneficiaries and manners of measure the benefits. In this context, this work presents a survey aimed at
analysing the research literature to analyse what are the main types of benefits and beneficiaries as well as
analysing methods. From the literature review, the paper presents a conceptual model that aims at establishing
the basis for a complete approach for benefit analysis in the public sector.
1 INTRODUCTION
Information Technology (IT) has become an integral
part of modern organisations as it has the potential
to enhance the performance at different levels such
as the operational or the strategic. Thus, in the last
decades, IT has represented a substantial financial in-
vestment for many organisations (Standing and Lin,
2007). In fact, it has been estimated that investments
in IT projects now amount at least the half of most
large organisations annual capital investments (Kohli
et al., 2012). Thus, IT executives and managers are
under pressure to find a way to forecast the contri-
bution of their investments to organisations, as well
as to find reliable ways to ensure that business ben-
efits from the investments are actually realised (Hin-
ton and Kaye, 2006). However, some survey studies
show that very few organisations have a complete or
comprehensive method or process to analyse and en-
sure potential benefits from investments in IT projects
(Ward et al., 1996). As a consequence, IT Managers
have found difficult to justify the IT investments. This
problem has become complex as the nature of IT
investments and the benefits delivered have evolved
over the time.
In the private sector companies, the benefits asso-
ciated with IT projects are measured in terms of finan-
cial value (Kohli et al., 2012; Davern and Kauffman,
2000) or organisational performance (Sabherwal and
Jeyaraj, 2015; Tambe and Hitt, 2012). More rarely, in-
tangible benefits are considered such as increasing of
innovation capacity (Kleis et al., 2012) and impact on
downsizing risk (Otim et al., 2012). Furthermore, in
the public sector, IT projects do not only generate the
aforementioned types of benefit but also create public
value through the generation of other types of bene-
fits, such as social and political benefits. The diversity
of benefit types in the public sector makes very hard
to quantify benefit targets during the planning phase
of IT projects and very complex and expensive to as-
sess the benefit level reached after project implemen-
tation. In addition, other circumstances of the public
institutions that make difficult to quantify and assess
benefits are: (i) the wide variety of beneficiaries that
need to be considered as the benefits will directly de-
pend on their expectations and needs; (ii) most of the
existing benefit methods consider the financial value
as the greatest benefit, giving little attention to intan-
gible benefits which are relevant to the public sector;
and (ii) IT managers in the public sector tend to focus
primarily on the delivery of a technical solution, on
time, tailored to the specifications and with the min-
imum budget expenditure (Ashurst et al., 2008; De-
varaj and Kohli, 2000; Lin and Pervan, 2003; Love
and Irani, 2004).
As in the private sector, in the public sector, insti-
Avila, O., Sastoque, S. and Cuevas, O.
A Literature Review of Benefit Analysis Approaches for IT Projects in the Public Sector.
DOI: 10.5220/0006333204110418
In Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems (ICEIS 2017) - Volume 2, pages 411-418
ISBN: 978-989-758-248-6
Copyright © 2017 by SCITEPRESS – Science and Technology Publications, Lda. All rights reserved
411

tutions lack of complete methods to analyse benefits
from investments in IT projects. Regarding the re-
search literature, some approaches have already been
proposed to this end, such as (Ward et al., 1997) and
(Remenyi et al., 1997). However, the reported use of
such approaches is fairly low and they do not cover all
the dimensions of benefit analysis in the public sector
such as the whole types of benefits and beneficiaries
as well as the manner of analyse and measure the ben-
efits.
Thus, our main objective is to carry out a sys-
tematic review of the literature in order to identify
and analyse the main methods that could help project
managers in the public institutions to respond the re-
search question formulated above. In addition, this
paper presents a conceptual model for benefit analy-
sis based on the systematic review in order to establish
the basis for the designing and development of a com-
plete approach for benefit analysis that includes the
main elements gathered in the reviewed approaches.
The remaining of this work is organised as follows:
Section 2 synthesises an analysis of the state of the
art related to the benefit management and realisation.
Section 3 introduce the model for benefit realisation
in the public sector. Finally, Section 4 concludes the
paper and introduce future work.
2 STATE OF THE ART
A modification to the methodology proposed by
(Mayring, 2014), consisting of the following steps,
was used to conduct this review process:
• Planning: This stage focuses on planning the
search to identify the most relevant contributions.
Thus we define research questions to conduct the
search as well as validate and select the most per-
tinent works.
• Realisation: It consists in making an exhaustive
search for works using the criteria defined in the
previous step and assessing the found approaches
in order to select those that answer the research
questions.
• Synthesis and Analysis: This stage is related to
the extraction of the relevant information of each
selected approach to answer each research ques-
tion.
• Towards a Conceptual Model: It consists in es-
tablishing the conceptual elements that allow the
construction of a conceptual model for benefit
analysis.
2.1 Planning
The following questions are proposed to analyse the
state of the art:
1. Who is benefited?, i.e., to identify the people,
communities, associations, organisations, public
and private institutions that are benefited from
benefits delivering.
2. What are the types of benefits?, i.e., to establish
what are the benefit types or categories.
3. How benefits are measured?, i.e., to determine the
means to measure the benefit level such as indica-
tors, metrics, targets, among others.
4. How benefits are analysed?, i.e., to identify meth-
ods, steps or procedures to analyse benefits.
5. How benefit are modelled?, i.e., to distinguish
notations, languages, models or symbols used to
model benefits.
6. In which phase of the project the benefit analysis
is performed?, i.e., before the project start, during
project execution or after project implementation.
2.2 Realisation
To find relevant works addressing the review objec-
tive and answering the review questions previously
defined, we use the Scopus and Google databases by
introducing the following criteria:
• Search Terms: IT Projects, Information Tech-
nology Projects, IT Implementation, Information
Technology, Public Sector, Government, Benefits
Measure, Cost Benefits Analysis, Business Case.
• Document Type: Scientific papers in confer-
ences and journals, guidelines published by gov-
ernments and state documents.
• Application Area: Information Technology and
Computer Science.
An initial search in Scopus was performed by
introducing the following query: TITLE-ABS (“IT
projects” OR “Information Technology Projects” OR
“IT Implementation” OR “Information Technology”)
AND TITLE-ABS (“Public Sector” OR “govern-
ment”) AND TITLE-ABS (“Benefits Measure” OR
“Cost Benefits Analysis” OR “Business case”). How-
ever, as we did not find a sufficient number of relevant
works from the scientific database (we only found 15
results), we completed the search by introducing the
query into Google to identify documents that were
not published in scientific journals and events. As
a consequence, we found that governments and pub-
lic institutions from several countries have proposed
ICEIS 2017 - 19th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems
412

frameworks to analyse benefits from their investments
in IT projects. In this way, we decided to add to the
results the works that followed a well defined method-
ology for their construction and were validated by ap-
plying them to, at least, a documented real case.
Therefore, we were able to collect 35 candidate
works. A selection of works was carried out by read-
ing the title and abstract of each candidate paper.
From this analysis the work was set to 20. Then a
reading of each work was performed, as a result the
number of works was reduced to 15.
2.3 Synthesis and Analysis
A synthesis of the selected works, with reference to
the research questions is presented below. Table 1
presents an overview of this analysis.
2.3.1 Who Is Benefited?
Beneficiaries described in the reviewed works (see
second column in table 1) can be classified as follows:
• Final beneficiaries: they can be characterised as
the last beneficiaries of the IT resources and capa-
bilities resulting from IT projects. These can be
classified into 2 broad categories:
– Internal beneficiaries: all stakeholders belong-
ing to the entity investing in the IT project, e.g.
public servants.
– External beneficiaries: all stakeholders that do
not belong to the entity that invests in the
project, e.g. citizens, private institutions, etc.
• Intermediate beneficiaries: they are public insti-
tutions or entities that consume the IT resources
and capabilities resulting from IT projects to im-
prove their operation and / or the public services
that they offer to the final beneficiaries.
2.3.2 What are the Types of Benefits?
The following typology of benefits has been identi-
fied for final beneficiaries. Table 2 shows the most
common benefit types examples.
• Financial: in this case, resulting IT resources and
capabilities enable the beneficiary to generate or
increase his income or reduce his costs.
• Political: consisting in enhancing participation
and equity or conferring political capital as well
as increasing transparency, among others.
• Social: related to social mobility, creating new
opportunities, improving quality of life, increas-
ing safety or improving working conditions.
• Strategic: helping the beneficiary to reach its high
level objectives. In this case, the main beneficia-
ries are public and private institutions, as well as
the state as a whole.
For intermediate beneficiaries the following typol-
ogy of benefits has been identified:
• Effectiveness: it is to help the public institution to
produce a desired result or reach a defined goal.
• Efficiency: it consists in helping the public institu-
tion to execute an activity, produce a desired result
with the minimum possible resources.
• Enabling: it is to allow the public institution to
execute an activity that was not possible to be per-
formed before.
Additionally, we identify two types of benefit nature:
(i) Quantifiable nature meaning that the benefit level
can be quantified; (ii) Qualitative nature, that is, the
benefit has a certain grade of subjectivity and is re-
lated to the perception of the beneficiaries.
2.3.3 How Benefits are Measured?
Means to measure the benefit level depend on the na-
ture of the benefit (quantitative or qualitative).
Measurement of quantitative benefits: The measure-
ment of this type of benefit is made through meth-
ods, metrics and unit of measurement. With respect
to the methods, for instance, (Australian Government
Information Service, 2004) uses a financial analysis
method that calculates the benefit level of the project
through a ratio between cost and revenue. These two
elements are determined by using metrics such as de-
preciation schedule, tax discount rate and cash flow.
Regarding established metrics, for example, (Al-Raisi
and Al-Khouri, 2010) propose to measure the ROI of
a project by joining the social, political and finan-
cial ROI. However their approach do not show how
to quantify each ROI. Concerning units of measure,
most of them propose money (euros or dollars) to
measure financial benefits, number of people bene-
fited for social benefits , time (hours, days, weeks,
etc.) to measure efficiency and effectiveness and per-
centages or specific ratio scales to measure political,
strategic and ethical benefits.
Measurement of Qualitative Benefits: The qualita-
tive measurement of benefits is commonly related to
characterise the perceptions of the beneficiaries about
how IT resources and capabilities resulting from IT
projects are impacting them in a positive way. For ex-
ample, to measure social benefits as qualitative ben-
efits, (Vaughan et al., 2012; MacCarthaigh, 2008;
Di Maio, 2003) evaluate the positive impact on citi-
zens when they use a new public IT service by using
satisfaction level categories.
A Literature Review of Benefit Analysis Approaches for IT Projects in the Public Sector
413

Table 1: Synthesis of the articles included in the review by using the research questions.
Ref. Benefit Types Beneficiaries Benefit Measures Method of Benefit
Analysis
Benefit Models Project Phase
(Al-Raisi and
Al-Khouri,
2010)
- Financial
- Political
- Social
- Government
- People
- Communities
- Measures: Social ROI, Politi-
cal ROI, Financial ROI
- Units: Money, number of peo-
ple benefited, number of new
policies
- ROI Analysis - N/A - After imple-
mentation
(Bhagwat
et al., 1992)
- Social
- Financial
- Communities - Measures: Benefit Cost Ratio
- Units: Money
- N/A - N/A - After Imple-
mentation
(Cresswell
et al., 2006)
- Financial
- Political
- Social
- Strategic
- Ideological
- Stewardship
- People (Direct
Mechanism)
- Public Institu-
tions (Indirect
Mechanism)
- Measures: Cost Savings, Qual-
ity, Enhanced trust
- Units: Seconds, number of
benefited people
- Benefit analysis
framework
- Link Diagram that
relates the benefi-
ciary to the benefit
impact.
- N/A
(North Ireland
Financial
Department,
2016)
- Financial
- Efficiency
- Strategic
- Social
- No benefit
- People (Direct
Mechanism)
- Public Institu-
tions (Indirect
Mechanism)
- Measures: N/A - Units:
Money, Time, Satisfaction levels
- Framework of four
stages
- Benefits depen-
dency network dia-
gram
- N/A
(Pollock et al.,
2014)
- Strategic
- Financial
- Social
- N/A - Measures: Net Present Public
Value, Benefit Cost Ratio
- Units: Money, number of ben-
efited people, payback period
- N/A - N/A - During all the
project phases
(Vaughan
et al., 2012)
- Efficiency
- Effectiveness
- Strategic
- People - N/A - N/A - N/A - After project
implementa-
tion
(Ward et al.,
2008)
- Financial
- Efficiency
- Enabling
- N/A - Measures: Key Performance
Indicators, Impact level of the
benefit
- Units: Money, number of ben-
efited people
- Method of six
stages
- Benefit table - Before the
start of the
project
(French
Agency for
the Devel-
opment of
Electronic Ad-
ministration,
2005)
- Financial
- Social
- Efficiency
- Effectiveness
- External people or
organisations
- Internal people or
organisations
- Measures: N/A
- Units: Money, Percentages,
Scale levels
- Mareva Methodol-
ogy
- Value Analysis:
modelling of bene-
fits, risks and need
of project through a
polar graph
- After project
implementa-
tion
(Booz et al.,
2002)
- Social
- Financial
- Strategic
- Political
- Efficiency
- Effectiveness
- Final users of IT
services
- Measures: Performance met-
rics defined by the analyst
- Units: N/A
- External people or
organisations
- Internal people or
organisations
- The Value Mea-
suring Methodol-
ogy
- After project
implementa-
tion
(Emerson
et al., 2000)
- Financial
- Social
- Strategic
- Public institutions
- Communities
- Measures: Social Return on
Investment, Business Indicators,
Social Indicators
- Units: Money, number of peo-
ple benefited
- Social Return on
Investment method-
ology
- N/A - N/A
(Australian
Government
Information
Service, 2004)
- Financial
- Strategic
- Social
- Communities
- Inner organisation
- Method: Financial Analysis
- Measures: N/A
- Units: Money, percentages,
scales
- The Demand and
Value Assessment
Methodology
- Benefits tables
and Strategic Value
Worksheet
- After project
Implementa-
tion
(MacCarthaigh,
2008)
- Ethical
- Political
- Efficiency
- Effectiveness
- Government insti-
tutions
- Community
- Measures: N/A
- Units: Money, percentages
- Service value
methodology
- N/A - N/A
(US Executive
Office for
President,
2007)
- N/A - Citizens
- Communities
- Method: Measuring model
- Measures: N/A
- Units: Money, time, number of
benefited people
- Performance Ref-
erence Model
- N/A - N/A
(Rothig, 2011)
- Financial
- Efficiency
- Effectiveness
- Enabling
- Public Institutions - Measures: N/A
- Units: Money, time
- WiBe Framework - N/A - Before the
start of the
project
(Di Maio,
2003)
- Political
- Enabling
- Private Sector
- Public Sector
- Method: Measure framework
- Measures: Political Indexes,
Key Performance indicators
- Units: Money
- N/A - N/A - N/A
ICEIS 2017 - 19th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems
414

Table 2: Benefit type examples classified by beneficiary type.
Beneficiary type Financial Political Social Strategic
External
- Revenue increase
- Cost and expenses reduction
- Treasury earnings
- Optimisation in expenses
and costs
- Empowerment and design of
public policies
- Information and oversight
- Election of representatives
and life democratic
- Quality of life
- Citizen security
- Social mobility
- New opportunities
- Facilitate interaction with
the institution
- Strategic plan
- Risk mitigation
- Competitive advantage
- Resource Optimisation
- New opportunities
- Decision
Internal
- Reach of economic objec-
tives
- Reducing costs and expenses
- Treasury earnings
- Optimisation in expenses
and costs
- Conferring political legiti-
macy and visibility
- Improve reputation and im-
age
- Decision making
- Articulation and implemen-
tation of public policies and
laws
- Improving working condi-
tions
- New opportunities
- Development plans and gov-
ernment
- Risk mitigation
- Competitive advantage
- Resource Optimisation
2.3.4 How Benefits are Analysed?
As it is shown in the column Method of benefit anal-
ysis of Table 1, the reviewed works use frameworks
and methods made mainly of steps. For instance,
(Ward et al., 2008) propose to define benefits within 6
steps: (i) define business motivators and investment
objectives; (ii) identify benefits, owners and mea-
sures; (iii) structure the benefits; (iv) identify organ-
isational changes; (v) determine the explicit value of
each benefit; and (vi) identify costs and risks. In turn,
(North Ireland Financial Department, 2016) presents
a method for managing benefits based on 4 steps: (i)
identification and structuring of benefits, (ii) planning
the benefits realisation, (iii) benefits implementation
and monitoring and (iv) benefits assessment. The
method emphasises in the first step which includes
three processes, namely, detailed benefit identifica-
tion, benefit modelling and benefit profiling. These
processes have allowed public institutions in North
Ireland to identify and classify benefits and respective
beneficiaries in the earliest phases of the IT project.
2.3.5 How Benefits are Modelled?
The reviewed works model benefits using several no-
tations such as polar graphs, link graphs, dependency
networks. For example, (North Ireland Financial De-
partment, 2016) models benefits through a benefits
dependency network diagram which relates three el-
ements: the enablers, intermediate beneficiaries and
final beneficiaries. (French Agency for the Devel-
opment of Electronic Administration, 2005) models
the benefits by using a polar graph that consider five
factors: (i) need for the project, (ii) internalities, (iii)
individual externalities, (iv) risk matrix and (v) prof-
itability in the public sphere.
2.3.6 In Which Phase of the Project the Benefit
Analysis Is Performed?
The benefit analysis is performed in three phases of
the project: (i) before the start of the IT project, (ii)
during execution and (iii) after implementation. In
the first case, the main objective is to identify and
plan potential benefits in order to assess them after
the project implementation (Rothig, 2011) or to evi-
dence the potential impact to get funding or sponsor-
ship (Ward et al., 2008). In the second case, the objec-
tive is to measure how the execution of the project can
generate benefits for the identified beneficiaries (Pol-
lock et al., 2014). Finally, in the third case, the ob-
jective of the benefit analysis is to measure the impact
and success of the project by comparing the planned
benefits vs the benefits being realised (Booz et al.,
2002; French Agency for the Development of Elec-
tronic Administration, 2005; Bhagwat et al., 1992) or
by showing benefits during the operation of IT ser-
vices (Australian Government Information Service,
2004; Vaughan et al., 2012; Al-Raisi and Al-Khouri,
2010).
2.4 Towards a Conceptual Model
From the analysis of the state of art, we conclude that
the reviewed works have in common, at least, the fol-
lowing: the success of IT projects depends on the
benefit generated from them against the investment
made for implementation. In addition, IT projects
generate IT resources and capabilities that, in most of
cases, are made available to a group of people or or-
ganisations in form of IT services. These services
aim at generating benefits to final beneficiaries or
supporting supporting the operation of public entities
in order to provide public services. The reviewed re-
search or practical works use methodologies to anal-
yse the benefits and models to characterise them ac-
cording to their type and nature. From the above, it
can be concluded that benefit identification is related
A Literature Review of Benefit Analysis Approaches for IT Projects in the Public Sector
415

to the analysis of the relationship between the follow-
ing conceptual elements: IT Project, Public Service,
IT Service, Beneficiary, Benefit, Benefit Type, Bene-
fit Measure, Benefit Nature, Methodology and Model.
Consequently, the following section presents a con-
ceptual model for benefit analysis from the elements
listed above.
3 CONCEPTUAL MODEL FOR
BENEFIT ANALYSIS OF IT
PROJECTS IN PUBLIC SECTOR
The proposed conceptual model, shown in Figure 1, is
designed to help public organisations to perform ben-
efit analysis that can be derived from IT projects. The
model consists on the following elements:
• Public Organisation: a public sector organisa-
tion is one that is operated by the government (Al-
Raisi and Al-Khouri, 2010).
• IT Project: an IT project is a project with at least
one Information System or Information Technol-
ogy component amongst its outputs (Project Man-
agement Institute, 2001).
• Public Service: a public service is a service
which is provided by the government to peo-
ple living within its jurisdiction (Cresswell et al.,
2006; MacCarthaigh, 2008).
• IT Service: an IT service is a complex and ab-
stract concept that involves IT, processes and peo-
ple (Avila and Sastoque, 2016).
• Beneficiary: a beneficiary is any person who
gains an advantage and/or profits from something
(Ward et al., 2008; French Agency for the Devel-
opment of Electronic Administration, 2005).
• Benefit: in this context, a benefit can be defined
as the expected outcome of an IT project that was
planned to meet the particular needs of differ-
ent stakeholders (Ward et al., 2008; Booz et al.,
2002).
• Benefit Type: the type of benefit is a benefit fea-
ture that allows to differentiate and classify the
type of advantage that a service provision has on
beneficiaries (Ward et al., 2008).
• Benefit Measure: the measure is a feature to cal-
culate the benefit level by using metrics, indica-
tors or targets (Ward et al., 2008).
• Benefit Nature: it is a benefit feature to deter-
mine how the benefit could be measured. This fea-
ture is related to quantitative and qualitative fea-
tures of the benefit (Ward et al., 2008).
• Model: a model is a simplified version of some-
thing complex used, for example, to analyse and
solve problems or make predictions (B
´
ezivin,
2005).
• Methodology: it is a system of broad principles
or rules from which specific methods or proce-
dures may be derived to interpret or solve differ-
ent problems within the scope of a particular dis-
cipline (Mayring, 2014).
Relations between the elements defined above are
given as follows: IT and public services are provided
by public organisations in order to enhance the qual-
ity life of citizens and deliver government programs.
Public organisations fund IT projects to implement IT
services that can support public services or be used
directly by the citizens. Beneficiaries use these ser-
vices and thus obtain benefits. These benefits may
have different types (financial, social, political, etc.),
measures (units, categories, etc.) and nature (quali-
tative and quantitative). Methodologies are used to
identify and analysing beneficiaries and benefits. In
addition, models are used to represent the benefits,
beneficiaries and projects with their relationships.
4 CONCLUSION AND FUTURE
WORK
This paper presents a literature review that identifies
and analyses research works for analysing benefits
from IT projects by using six research questions. Re-
garding the first research question, who is benefited?,
we identified two beneficiary classes: final and inter-
mediate beneficiaries. The rationale behind this clas-
sification is that IT resources and capabilities result-
ing from IT projects can be provided directly to final
beneficiaries or to public entities (intermediate bene-
ficiaries) that use them to improve their operation and
provide better services to the final beneficiaries. Re-
specting the second research question, what are the
types of benefits?, we identify that, unlike the pri-
vate sector, in the public sector IT projects do not
only generates financial benefits. Thus, we found four
benefit types for final beneficiaries (financial, social,
political and strategic) and three benefit types for in-
termediate beneficiaries (efficiency, effectiveness and
enabling). This fact makes benefit analysis in the pub-
lic sector a more complex task because of the diffi-
culty to define targets those benefit types as well as to
quantify the real impact or benefit level reached after
project implementation. Another interesting founding
is that any of the reviewed works suggests the 7 bene-
fit types, which constitutes one of the main contribu-
ICEIS 2017 - 19th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems
416

PUBLIC
ORGANISATION
provides
PUBLIC
SERVICE
IT
SERVICE
BENEFIT
BENEFICIARY
IT
PROJECT
METHODOLOGY
BENEFIT
TYPE
BENEFIT
NATURE
BENEFIT
MEASURE
MODEL
PERSON
ORGANISATION
provides
funds
implements
supports
uses
gets
generates
generates
analyses
represents
is characterised by
is
Figure 1: Conceptual model for benefit analysis.
tions of the present work. Regarding the third ques-
tion, How benefits are measured?, the main measure-
ment elements suggested in the reviewed works are:
measurement methods, metrics and units of measure.
Indeed, the use of these elements seems to be diffi-
cult considering that the authors do not show in detail
their application. With respect to the fourth question,
how the benefits are analysed?, the methods and pro-
cedures are applied to small case studies in a manual
way, what highlights the lack of software applications
to facilitate their use in larger cases. Regarding the
fifth question, benefits can be modelled using several
notations such as polar graphs and dependency net-
works. The former is the most reliable and easy to use
notation technique because it is graphical and allows
the project manager to illustrate benefits in one page.
Concerning the sixth question, few approaches show
strength to analyse benefits during the three phases
of the IT project defined by us: before starting, dur-
ing execution and after implementation. Respecting
the conceptual model proposed in this paper, it sum-
marises the most important findings as well as the
experience obtained by practitioners and researchers
that wrote the reviewed works. In addition, it provides
important concepts and their relationship that public
entities can consider when identifying benefits. One
of the main conclusions that can be extracted from
the model is that benefits are not directly generated
by IT Projects but by the IT Services that are imple-
mented from them. In this way, IT services emerges
as an important element which motivates further re-
search on how the articulation between IT projects
and e-government generates public value to citizens
and, in general, to the society.
As future work, the conceptual model can be used
to propose a complete approach that includes the tax-
onomy of beneficiaries and benefits identified in this
paper. In addition, the approach can addresses the
three phases of the project and includes conceptual
elements to facilitate its use. Such conceptual ele-
ments can be a graphical notation to model benefits
and a well established method with steps to guide the
project manager in the task.
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