Facilitating the Performance of IT Evaluation in Business Groups: Towards a Maturity Model

Leading market analysts such as Gartner, Forrester Research and IDC expect again for 2012 an increase of global information technology (IT) spending between 3.7% and 6.9% compared to 2011. This trend emphasises the fact that ensuring the effectiveness and efficiency of IT or IT evaluation is a substantial task of strategic IT management. Weighing costs and benefits is already a real challenge for IT executives nowadays and is getting even more complex in the environment of business groups. Business groups are a collective of legally independent companies which are owned and partially managed by a core entity or management holding. The purpose of this paper is to develop a maturity model for IT evaluation on the group level as a management instrument to analyse and evaluate the current setup as well as to identify possible areas for improvement. The maturity model development is based on design science research and evaluated with experts residing on the management level from particular business groups.