IT projects can have large and wide-ranging impacts on business processes. These impacts can occur directly in the business processes involved in the project and in other related processes. Methods for the analysis of business processes are too large a subject to cover in detail in this guide, so a brief introduction to these techniques is included in the section on methods below. The reasons for including attention to these methods in ROI work is related to the overall strategic objective of the project and how it fits into the rest of the organization.

The business process perspective concen- trates on where an IT project fits within the larger picture of the organization’s mission or core purpose. For example, a state department of transportation typically has responsibility for ensuring the safety of the transportation infrastructure. This would usually include responsibility for inspecting bridges on state highway systems and contracting for repairs where needed. The main elements of that business process includes many activities, from decision making about inspection policies and schedules through contracting for repair and construction work. The activities could include scheduling and performing inspections, reporting and analyzing results, then moving into the RFI, RFP development, bidding, contracting, and project supervision. Any change in one part of the IT system in an interconnected business process like this one, would likely have important impacts on other business processes. An IT project that places electronic sensors on bridges that send stress data to the central office will affect more than the inspection process. It will have ripple effects all the way from the employment and training of inspectors to the costs of new construction and the public’s perception of bridge safety. These latter concerns are all potential elements in an ROI analysis.

The interconnectedness of IT projects and the overall business process is nicely illustrated in one recent experience with a Web project in New York City. The City government added a section on its Web site reporting the results of its Health Department inspections of restaurants. The IT staff did not anticipate the popularity and high demand for such information. Nor did they understand the effects that demand would have on other linked elements of the business process, which includes both producing and disseminating inspection results. The Web server was initially overwhelmed by hits on the inspection information soon after it was posted; word of mouth communication rapidly spread the news. That problem could be easily fixed with additional server capacity. However, the high-level of public demand for this information and its significant impacts on restaurateurs put new pressures on the Health Department. They were pressed to increase the timelines of inspections and to use more plain language to ensure better understanding of the results. These were substantial cost factors directly related to the Web site project. A narrow focus on the IT component of the project led the planners to miss the effects on linked elements of the business process. The results were both unanticipated costs resulting from down-stream impacts on the business process and unanticipated benefits due to increased service levels to the citizens.

The linkages in this example extend from the specific details of an IT project—new data on a Web site—all the way to the relationship of the organization to its political environment. These linkages and their importance are obvious in retrospect, as are many implications for both costs and returns. The goal of good business process and ROI analyses is to provide the same insights and information for planning and decision making in advance. How that can be done is outlined in the description of methods below.

Business process models make the implicit assumptions and mental models of individual managers and stakeholders more explicit and open for discussion. They also:

• inhibit premature jumping to a solution because of the way they structure thinking about a problem;
• create an externalized definition of the problem that can serve as a focus of discussion and can help to align thinking about what are root causes of observed problems;
• force managers and analysts to come to grips with the precise logic or causal forces that are causing a problem;
• require attention to decide which key variables to measure;
• allow analysts and managers to communicate their reasoning effectively and efficiently to external audiences;
• can provide a simulation of how the full system will operate within a full context of organizational and human factors;
• push managers to see the implications of a limited prototype when it is expanded to full scale operations, requiring careful attention to technical, organizational, and policy issues; and
• can include financial elements that allow explicit exploration of costs and benefits of proposed solutions.

Sensitivity analyses of models provide answers to "what if" questions about various types of system functionalities and possible organizational and human effects. This helps planners anticipate issues and problems before they are encountered in a real world system implementation