Modern organizations cannot operate without significant investments in information technology to support both routine operations and new innovations. However, the constantly changing aspect of technology and the risks of innovation pose dilemmas for organizations. All innovations have risks resulting from the interactions among innovation characteristics and organizational characteristics. Insufficient knowledge and understanding of these interactions leads to uncertainty about consequences, thus generating significant organizational and operational risks.

In IT applications, poor risk management often leads to failure. Recent research indicates that 50 to 80 percent of IT initiatives in both the public and private sectors fail completely or produce unsatisfactory results. Some of the risk factors that lead to such failures include misidentifying the problem, underestimating complexity, instituting inadequate controls and monitoring, a lack of champions and sponsors, overvaluing novelty, and unstable environments.

Some factors that contribute to the failure of IT projects are unique to public sector organizations. Unlike private sector firms, for example, public agencies are accountable to many more stakeholders who pursue divergent objectives, rather than a shared bottom line. This engenders problems in project valuation and measurement of effectiveness. In addition, the structural characteristics of a public agency that limit the discretion of any one decision maker also limit the ability to act quickly or creatively prevent project failures.

Regardless of the growing body of descriptive, theoretical, and practical knowledge about information technology, practitioners seem unable to sense early failure symptoms or even avoid well-known shortcuts to failure. The deeper causes of failure appear to be only partially known. A variety of new and emerging frameworks are moving away from the past dependence on purely technical models and introducing models that incorporate more social, behavioral, and organizational factors for understanding information technologies and their application and use in organizations. All of these factors are significant in systems that support the work of individual organizations, but they increase in importance - and difficulty - when systems must connect multiple organizations across time, geography, and functional roles.

Information technology selection, use, and management affect nearly every activity and responsibility in grants making. IT supports communication about research initiatives and opportunities to propose projects. Investigators use IT to communicate with program officers and each other in the process of developing proposals. IT is used to support the proposal review and selection process and to identify and manage subsequent awards. Investigators use IT to help support the research process and to communicate results. Sometimes separate systems are used for different activities. Some systems, such as National Science Foundation's FastLane, incorporate many functions into a more comprehensive system.