IS managers are being put under increasing pressure to justify the value of corporate ITIS expenditure. Their constant quest for the 'holy grail' continues, as existing methods and approaches of justifying ITIS expenditure are still failing to deliver. The decision making process is not as objective and transparent as it is claimed or intended to be. This paper discusses seven commonly used tactics used by business managers to influence IT appraisals. The paper takes a 'devil's advocate' position and adopts some irony when looking at the area of power and politics in IT evaluation. Rather than promoting the use of these techniques, this article aims to raise awareness that IT evaluation is not as rational as most IT evaluation researcherspractitioners would want it to be or indeed claim it to be. It is argued that rationalisation or counter tactics may counteract influence techniques in an attempt to get behind the cloak and dagger side of organisational power and politics, but politics and power in decision‑making cannot and should not be filtered out. Due to dissimilarities of objectives, limitations of time and information, influence techniques will always be used. However, rather than being counterproductive, these techniques are essential in the process of decision making of IT projects. They help organisations reach better decisions, which receive more commitment than decisions that were forced to comply with strictly rational approaches. Awareness of the influence and manipulation techniques used in practice will help to deal with power and politics in IT evaluation and thereby come to better IT investment decisions.

This paper discusses peer assessment as a component of the assessment strategy used for Information Systems student group projects at a South African university. The value of peer assessment and the contribution to the real‑life experience offered by group projects, will be discussed. It will also illustrate how this process adds value by enhancing deep learning. Its value as a complementary assessment instrument in a multiple assessment strategy and how the results of peer assessment are used to recognise individual contributions to group performance will be illustrated. The use of peer assessment as an instrument for both informal formative assessment and formal summative assessment will be described. To perform the peer assessment specific instruments were designed and used throughout the lifecycle of the course.

While defining or measuring the effectiveness of the information systems (IS) function has proven complicated, further effort on refining IS assessment is essential for the effective management and continuous improvement of both the IS function and the organisation. In addition, an effort to investigate the relationships among the established IS assessment tools to better reconcile their existing differences is warranted. This paper aims to clearly differentiate the notions of 'Software' from 'Information Systems'. A new IS assessment model is proposed to provide a more holistic view on how IS quality may be assessed by means of a process capability understanding of evaluating IS effectiveness within the organisational context.

This paper contains a proposal of a compact IT value assessment method. It follows the assumption that most methods available for the public are either described in a very general manner or concentrate on one of the evaluation aspects only. The proposed method relates the evaluation approach to the main IT initiative characteristics, such as the investment purpose and IT element to be implemented. Based on these criteria, the evaluation process is shaped by putting emphasis on the relevant evaluation aspects and choosing the relevant evaluation methods. The method design is focused on the ease of use and practical relevance so it can be used by IT practitioners to assess IT initiatives in their organisations. The paper finishes with the case study of the method usage in a mid‑sized production enterprise.

The history of the management of information systems includes many ideas that were intended to simplify the complexities of the management task, but there is still a great deal of wasted investment that produces no significant benefits. Much of the thinking has been rational and structured, but it can be argued that structured thinking will not solve the problems presented by the ever‑increasing scope and depth of information systems, the need for improved responsiveness and agility, and the need to deal with a range of requirements that are sometimes behavioural and sometimes legislative. Three of the more frequently cited frameworks for information management (Zachman, Henderson & Venkatraman, Ward), are briefly reviewed and found to have common characteristics. They are combined into a new, simple arrangement of the central (and critically important) ideas. This new framework has been used as the basis of a survey instrument that is introduced and explained; it works at two levels ‑ the "micro" and "macro" levels. It assesses perceptions of organisational capability to manage information well, as seen by respondents who are normally employees working in different roles with varying responsibilities. The survey instrument comes with an analysis and reporting package that is found to be suitable for the needs of busy managers, and the way in which micro and macro data is presently analysed and presented is demonstrated using data from a reference dataset, a CIO workshop, an investigation within a real estate agency and a large financial services organisation. The contribution of this work to the research programme from which it emanated is summarised and future directions briefly explained.