Synen på värdering av Itsystem. En kvalitativ studie av IT-investeringar i fyra kommuner i Västra Götaland
When a municipality is about to realize an IT investment, e.g. an economy system, theywill need to do procurement according to the laws of procurements. To perform suchprocurement takes time and energy from the everyday work at the municipalities, andtherefore they want to make a quick and efficient procurement. Unfortunately it showsthat municipalities do not always make an assessment that is sufficient enough for theirneeds, which can result in an inefficient system in a longer perspective. Municipalitiesthink more often about the hard values such as costs of the investments, and not alwaysas much when it comes to the soft values, like the user-friendliness. An IT investmentmay here suddenly get worse effect than what you had expected. The fact that thesethings can happen when doing an IT-investment, we wanted to find out the following:?In what way is assessing done before IT-investments are decided in a municipality??To answer our question, we have conducted an exploratory study in which the outcomehas been based on the answers from the various respondents in the four municipalitiesthat we have visited and where we have done interviews. As there are not so muchstudies or research in this field, it became even more interesting to find out what adifference an assessment can make before a bigger IT-investment in a municipality.We?ve been working from three different topics: Internal system usage, Assessment andCollaboration. Municipalities should, according to policies and regulations, do some typeof assessment before an IT-investment is made. In our study we found out that only oneof the four municipalities made an assessment before an IT-investment, and onemunicipality had begun to work on it.Keywords: IT-investment, assessment, assessing, municipality, public sector