Mega IT as Public Property: A Call for Innovative Evaluation Methods

In this chapter we identify characteristics of a certain type of IT mega project that, when large majority of the public are supposed to be end-users, can run the risk of becoming impervious to the usual project management best practices, despite the fact that best practices seemed to work well in the process of the project. We coin this type of mega projects as "Volatile Mega IT" due to their nature of being easy to notice but difficult to grasp. This nature makes it very hard to evaluate the results of VMIT projects because the recipients of the evaluation results are entangled or part of the system and its evaluation results. Through the characteristics we identify a possible new sublime, a construct of major influence on mega projects, that manifests itself as the negative publicity which a stakeholder group enmanates around the IT mega project. In line with the current overall theme of this book we argue that new innovative and practically useful approaches are needed to evaluate IT mega projects that can handle this new sublime in ways that previous methods seem unable.