An Approach for Assessing the Benefits of IT Investments in Global Supply Chains

This paper develops and demonstrates a novel approach for ex-ante assessment of business benefits from IT investments in global supply chains. Extant IT assessment approaches are typically based on the assumption that benefit realization from IT investments involves a single stakeholder and are pro-duced by the technology as an isolated product. In contrast, research on global supply chains has shown that benefits generated from IT investments in this domain are typically generated by the coor-dinated use of many stakeholders and by technologies producing complimentary effects in systemic relationships. The assessment approach in this paper brings the contingent inter-organizational and technological dependencies of IT investments to the forefront of the assessment. It provides actors in industries relating to global supply chains the means to better apprehend the possible benefits from an IT investment and an understanding of the contingencies of these benefits. The approach was devel-oped through an iterative design science research process in close collaboration with a major ship-ping line. The usefulness of the approach is demonstrated through the ex-ante assessment of the busi-ness impact of investing in digital container devices that enables monitoring of containers en route.