Research Finds Public Sector Value Creation Goes Beyond Traditional Financial and Service Evaluation

The Center for Technology in Government (CTG) at the University at Albany released Advancing Return on Investment Analysis for Government IT: A Public Value Framework, along with five integral case study reports. The white paper takes on one of the biggest problems facing government IT projects: describing and measuring public value. CTG partnered on this project with SAP, to produce a comprehensive, non-proprietary public ROI methodology.

Based on the analysis of the five international case studies, CTG found that two key sources of public returns are:

• Value to the public that results from improving the government itself
• Value that results from delivering specific benefits directly to persons or groups.

The cases showed how public value creation can extend far beyond the expected financial savings and service evaluation data to actually increasing the integrity and transparency of government. This expanded scope of value often includes a wide range of stakeholders, each with their special interests and expectations from government.

"The main goal of the white paper was to introduce an assessment of public returns that is credible, persuasive, and highly relevant to the investment decisions faced by governments," said Anthony Cresswell, deputy director at the Center for Technology in Government and lead author of the white paper.

"Most methods for assessing return on investment focus solely on financial or economic metrics; this approach provides a broader, more diverse range of ways in which IT investments can produce results of value to citizens or to the society as a whole."

Participating case study organizations included:

• The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania's Integrated Enterprise System -- ERP implementation to put in place the technical infrastructure and enterprise standards for core administrative functions.
• The government of Israel's Merkava Project -- Effort to restructure the financial, logistics, and human resource components of governmentwide administration into an integrated ERP system.
• The Austrian Federal Budgeting and Bookkeeping System -- A redesign and integration of the government's electronic workflow for federal budget and bookkeeping processes.
• The Province of New Brunswick, Canada's Service New Brunswick -- A multi-channel "single window" citizen access to government services as well as maintenance of geographic information databases.
• The Washington State Digital Archives -- Investment in digital archiving for government records to provide collection, preservation and access to records of enduring legal and historical significance.

"The scope of government investment in IT is substantial --- and growing. That, coupled with the inability to truly measure its impact, makes the topic of 'value' a critical one," said Tom Shirk, president of SAP Global Public Services. "This white paper provides a comprehensive and universal method to helping government measure public value -- and the assessment framework offers both a systematic approach to thinking about public value as well as how to apply that approach to a particular IT decision. We welcome the use of this framework by not only our customers, but the industry as a whole."

Advancing Return on Investment Analysis for Government IT: A Public Value Framework and all five case study reports can be downloaded from the CTG Web site and from the SAP Web site.