Barriers to value specification when carrying out digitalization projects

Abstract

If digitalization projects aim to effectively create value for a company, one precondition is having a shared view among company staff and project members of what the "desirable" value is. However, it has been shown that few companies fully understand the value that digitalization projects can create for them, while many companies still launch digitalization projects without this understanding. This contributes to the current "alarmingly" low success rate for digitalization projects. Development of effective methods to specify the desired values of digitalization projects is thus important. One step in developing improved specification methods is to ask what the possible barriers are to improving current value specification practices. The purpose of the current study is to address this. We analyzed several digitalization projects regarding how specifications of desired project value were carried out, finding that very limited resources are spent on specifying desired values in digitalization projects, and that this limits project success. Likewise, there are several barriers to increasing resources for specifying desired values. Our findings contribute to understanding the development of value specification methods that aim to overcome these barriers and thus could help improve the success rate of digitalization projects.