Business Cases Are a Waste of Time (But Do Them Anyway), says Susan Cramm at her Harvard Business Publishing blog.

She plays off an older post by Andrew McAfee, who wrote:

Across the hundreds of quantitative IT business cases I've seen, I'd estimate that the average ROI figure was about 100%. This brings up an obvious question, which I asked to every business case author that I could find: "If this ROI figure is at all accurate, why are companies spending money on anything else except IT? If there really are all these 100% ROI projects out there, doesn't Finance 101 say that companies should immediately start lots of them, and not stop until the marginal return is less than the return from traditional investments like advertising, R&D, capacity expansion, etc.?"

I never got a satisfactory answer to this question until I read Strategy Maps and saw Kaplan and Norton's points about how nebulous the numerator-- the financial returns-- of this ROI figure is, and how the denominator is actually composed not only of IT capital, but also human and organizational capital (what I call the 'organizational complements' of IT).

Previously from Cramm: "Good news! Your project was approved. Even better! Your funding was cut!

...Too much money results in lengthy, bloated projects...the way to solve a big problem is to make it a series of small problems."