8. Criteria: business improvement

The 'return' on an investment for a new system may be less tangible compared to a straightforward money or technical improvement. Furthermore, it may take a while to actually measure a change. For example, a relevant business improvement might be:

Market Share

The system may have been developed to provide competitive advantage in order to gain market share. In which case the evaluation criteria should include a measure of market share set in the short term future - maybe market share measured six months after system roll-out.

Customer Relations

This is a key topic for many businesses and many systems provide support for this. For example a 'CRM' (Customer Relationship Management) system helps organise and automate this interaction. So developing a set of evaluation criteria to measure this may be important.

Brand Identity

Organisations may invest in systems to improve brand awareness. For example a system to deal with social media. Even this can be readily measured by doing brand recall and brand awareness studies.

Conclusion

If a system is intended to support a less tangible aspect of the company, then quantifiable evaluation criteria should be developed and agreed upon.