Prioritising IT Applications’ Readiness using Balanced Scorecards in Saudi Arabia
Defining a realistic strategy, that directs employees to achieve the organisation's strategic goals, is an important step towards achieving an organisation's objectives. Balanced Scorecards are one of the most useful tools and management systems to measure an organisation's performance against defined targets. In many instances the use of Information Technology within the organisation is essential to achieve a satisfying degree of the strategic objectives due to the IT readiness within the organisation. IT readiness of an organisation can be defined as the degree of the software applications can provide the desired functionality and operations required by departments and sections within the organisation in order to achieve the strategic goals. This research shows how Balanced Scorecards can be used to identify and priorities process requirements for IT readiness to align within organisation business strategy. Four main research questions were formulated here: how to determine projects priorities in adopting targets and weight and importance for each application, how algorithms and metrics used to measure the importance of needed applications can be developed and then how to assess their readiness. Finally, what are the methodologies used to develop a framework to priorities applications in terms of their readiness to achieve the strategic objectives. The framework used to priorities applications have been developed and tested in this research. This implementation was based on a mathematical model used to calculate the importance and the readiness of each application in public organisation in Saudi Arabia. Moreover, a comparison between the percentages of the expected achieved targets with prioritizing application readiness and the current achievements was provided.
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