What factors Company should consider while measuring information systems benefits?

Organizations are using Information Systems to achieve multiple goals. Like information systems help different business sections to maintain valuable information flow between them.  Higher level managers can access necessary information as per their recommended format (without delay). IS systems are heavily involved in developing, assisting and maintain business strategies.   Also information systems act as product or act as service to support organization activities. Information systems are used in many business (organizational) internal and external processes (areas). Information systems usage is changes according to business goals, organization environment and organization culture so there is no one standard approach (factor) to measure information system (or we can say we cannot measure all information benefits using one approach).

The main factors involved in measuring information systems benefits are mentioned below

1)    Organizational performance (meeting time and budget target, work quality) :  This factor includes ability of system usage to meet deadline and milestones, operating within budget and doing quality work.  To measure this factor company can implement information system in one section and compare the productivity of people who are using information system and productivity of people who are not using information system.

2)    Business Values:  Business value deals with market place goals.  The system involved to improve business value they have direct impact on company’s relationship with its customers, clients or suppliers (meeting customer requirement, providing customers satisfactions, maintain customer loyalty).  For example several information systems implemented to help marketing unit to analyze current customer as well as potential customer.  The company also experienced higher customer retention and lower direct sales costs.  The information systems affected their sales directly through the marketing decisions the system supported, thus the value of the investment could be stated in business terms.

3)    Product or service (Business profitability measures, cost, cycle time):  An information system can be offer in the form of product or service to improve organization revenue.  So in this case value of information systems can be measure in the form of business profitability measures such Return on Investment, Return on Asset and Return on Equity.   Also company can measure information system benefit in terms of customer relations, employee morals (after implementing system employee productivity is increased or decreased) job satisfaction, retention & personal growth and cycle time or how long it takes to accomplish a complete assignment. Faster cycle time means complete more tasks in within less time (saving hours). The cost and cycle time measuring factors are changes according to organization goals (as per market requirements).