The current economic climate and leadership changes nationwide make taxpayers and legislators edgier with how public money is being spent. Competition for IT funding continues, as does the pressure to demonstrate results. IT's broad potential to completely transform public services presents governments with an unprecedented opportunity to deliver conveniences to citizens. On the other hand, the belt is tightening.

Passage of the Federal Funding and Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006 has suggested that accountability is here to stay. Yet how can results of the almost infinite ways IT can enhance services for citizens be measured?

The Center for Technology in Government (CTG) and software giant SAP partnered to study how various governments globally have successfully used and measured IT.

"We looked at how government IT investments come to deliver value to the public, or public return on investment [ROI]," said Russ LeFevre, SAP's director of public sector solutions marketing. "We then wanted to come up with a way for governments to measure the social and political benefits of IT."

The partnership researched five governments -- two states, one Canadian province and two foreign nations -- based on their use of IT in business processes and their quantifiable accommodation of community and social needs.

LeFevre described ROI as a stool with three legs.

The first leg, or component, is financial/operational ROI, which "is the traditional way organizations measure things, with a classic cost-benefit financial measurement," LeFevre said.

The second leg, social ROI, "has a benefit to society at large, such as determining how well law enforcement is securing citizen safety."

Third, political ROI should show what kind of payback the investment brings to the state capital and lawmakers, who present and justify policies, and request appropriations. In other words, political capital, LeFevre said.

This threefold idea formed the foundation for a possible model for government to use. "We took that concept and wanted to formalize a new methodology that could be universal and nonproprietary and beneficial for all kinds of governments," he said.

Give Us Something We Can Use

What makes this particular model stand out is its universality, said LeFevre.
"This framework can be used for almost any kind of IT investment on any level of government. It first identifies the business goal of the IT investment, or the internal agency return, such as reducing inventory levels or granting access on portal," he said. "That is typically where it stops for most governments."

However, many other stakeholders are typically involved and impacted by an IT investment, such as the public at large, the vendor community and suppliers. "This framework is universal in part because every government in the world will have a similar set of stakeholders," said LeFevre.

In addition, investments impact various business processes within an organization, such as the procurement system and various personnel. LeFevre mentioned the federal government's model of using business processes and enterprise architecture as an appropriate way "to align the value mechanisms to the individual stakeholders and determine how each agency should fulfill requirements."

A framework also made sense for the project because of the ongoing need to reinvent the wheel for new people coming in.

"It's a cyclical process, because the environment is always changing in government with new leaders, and the benefits need to be reiterated," LeFevre said.

Project phase two involves rolling out the methodology in a few key government sites on the state, local and federal levels that have not yet been identified.

Measuring the Intangibles

Still, the task of measuring the effects of IT on the more intangible aspects of daily life mentioned in the study -- such as social status, membership in a community and customer