Value-based IT decision support: Towards a formal business value model for steering IT-business alignment

The problem: Value creation and delivery are recurrently mentioned in the literature as important drivers for effective business and IT decision making. However, the knowledge concerning value creation is commonly offered in vague, informal and subjective terms and, for that reason, corporate executives and IT staff depend mostly on personal expertise, background and intuition to practice what theory recommends. Our proposed solution: We propose a formal business value model, which aims to provide value-based decision support with less subjectivity. Validation: An illustrative example applying the preliminary model is presented, followed by a real case study where the model has been applied to support decisions in recent Brazilian municipal elections, in which an electronic voting system fully supported by IT services was used. In the first, the model was able to express in numbers information originally available only in subjective terms. In the latter, IT decision-making was guided towards better IT-Business alignment.