Information Worker Tools Selection, Adoption and Evaluation: Lessons from Software Development history

Information Worker Productivity and Quality - the bugbear of the IT department today - is not agreed upon, and it is challenged on every front. Key books and papers of late have averred that if the Productivity Paradox has been fixed, then we now have a situation where no differential gain from IT processes and tools can be garnered, so we might as well concede the point. Patently false, but what we lack is a set of valid metrics to demonstrate the value of our expenditures. This paper describes a selection, adoption, and evaluation structure that the author has used for software tools in a variety of companies over the past fifteen years. The lessons that emerge are quite useful for IT groups who seek to build truly valuable and utilized environments today.