IT Evaluation in Business Groups: A Maturity Model

Ensuring the effectiveness and efficiency of IT is a substantial aim of IT evaluation which is part of the strategic IT management. Weighing costs and benefits of IT is per se a complex and difficult process but gets even more challenging in the context of business groups. Business groups are a collective of legally independent entities that are owned and managed by a holding or parent company respectively. The purpose of this paper is to develop a maturity model for IT evaluation on the group level as a governance instrument to analyze and evaluate the current setup as well as to identify possible areas for improvement. In this way, maturity models facilitate the evolutionary reengineering of IT functions as they allow benchmarking assessments and roadmap planning to be carried out. The development of the maturity model is based on design science research and evaluated through various expert interviews, a focus group workshop and a real-world implementation.