Effects-Driven IT Development

Effects-driven IT development attempts to provide a sustained focus on the effects to be achieved by users through their adoption and use of a system. Simply put, the overall idea is to capture the purpose of a system in terms of effects that are both measurable and meaningful to the customer, and to systematically evaluate whether these effects are attained during real use of the system. A sustained focus on effects accentuates that the functionality of a system is merely a means to an end, but it also entails that effects must not only be specified but also evaluated in the course of the development process. That is, effects-driven IT development blurs the distinction between design and organizational implementation – between design and use.
The idea of effects-driven IT development is generally applicable to all large-scale IT projects but will in this project be investigated in the context of healthcare information infrastructures such as Electronic Patient Record (EPR) systems.
The long-term aim of the project is to investigate how the effects of the use of a system could play a prominent role in the contractual definition of IT projects and how contract fulfilment could be determined on the basis of proven utility value and measured effects.