A New Model to Identify and Evaluate Critical Success Factors in theIT Projects; Case Study: Using RFID Technology in“Iranian Fuel Distribution System”

Many organizations use Information Technology (IT) to improve their performance in the business and operations. But, most of the IT projects suffer from a high risk of failure when implemented. Recently, many studies have been attended on the concept of critical success factors (CSFs) in order to affect the rate of success, but a little effort has been focused on developing strong models to facilitate the CSFs extraction and evaluation processes. We found that there are remarkable cultural, managerial, industrial differences and also, a considerable business atmosphere gap between the developing countries like Iran and the developed countries. Therefore, the related CSFs in the developed countries may not be directly applicable by Iranian project managers and they need to be adapted. Furthermore, it has been repeatedly reported that there are some limitations related to CSFs identification methods such as Rockart’s methodology. In this paper, we have offered a new developed model to extract and evaluate the CSFs of IT projects. This model has brought the theoretical backgrounds, the experts’ views and the AHP technique’s benefits together and it may be applied as a means to improve the IT project management ability. Thereafter, we have used our model to identify and evaluate CSFs of an important IT project, known as: “using RFID technology in Iran Fuel Distribution System”. The most important CSFs were identified and prioritized as: Support from senior management; Hardware substructure; Technology sanction; Pilot project; Beneficiary s participation and Data management.