ISAC6+ Delivering Smarter Administration through innovation - a Benefits Realisation approach to ensuring success.

The paper describes how the Project Management discipline of benefits realisation has been applied to an EU funded E-government initiative. It explores the benefits of using this approach, the challenges to be addressed, and suggest a framework for applying the approach to other local and national e-government initiatives. One of the key project objectives is to demonstrate through the pilot that implementation of the iSAC6+ system will provide value for money by delivering the desired benefits both to government office users and citizens. The approach described here focuses on costs and benefits generated by use of the system. There are staff costs for training, support and operation, technical costs for integrating iSAC6+ in to existing systems and websites, and more significantly organisational costs for designing and implementing new procedures and working practices. Citizens too will incur costs to access and use the service. In iSAC6+ we have created a model of costs and benefits which can be applied in the short term to the pilot, and in the longer term to a much larger number of public organisations. The aim of the Benefits Realisation model is to demonstrate that iSAC6+ is capable of delivering value for money, and thus to justify the investment needed for expanding its use. Information Technology project success or failure is traditionally judged against objectives set during initial project planning. Enterprises, both public and private sector, have found this approach inadequate because long term costs and benefits do not occur until after the project has completed. Benefits Realisation emerged in the 1990s and developed two roles: a discipline for anticipating and quantifying the expected value of a project in terms of the costs and benefits which will accrue after the project itself is complete; and an over-arching project management philosophy. The paper uses the case study experience to comment upon these two different perspectives. The model developed within the project is based upon the recognised public sector costing formula, the Standard Cost model (SCM) but goes much further by integrating it into a Benefits Realisation tool which creates an audit trail from organisational strategic aims through to detailed cost measures for both quantitative and qualitative incidences.