Using Past Performance to Improve Future Practice

Abstract

In spite of the decades of experiences of IS development and the substantial amount of research spent on research in the area, there is little evidence to suggest that there have been significant improvements in the effectiveness of system development methods. There are of course numerous potential explanations for the failure and many new approaches put forward to overcome the problems. Our research, which is built around case studies of how development projects are evaluated, suggests that method use and project management could be improved by making greater use of past experiences. We propose a framework for method evaluation and improvement which incorporates findings from empirical studies and theoretical perspectives from organizational learning and IS evaluation literatures.