Evaluating the impact of a new Technology within a Business Environment: A Methodology supporting Strategic Choices

Globalization and new technologies are forcing firms to adopt continuous processes of change. Change Management has become a widespread discipline within firms because it allows to manage change in the best possible way and to prevent drastic consequences that could lead the company into failures. Within change management, knowledge management and impact analysis allow managers from one side to find and extract information and from the other-one to make ex-ante evaluations by identifying critical factors of failure, formulating recovery plans, and estimating potential benefits deriving from technological investments, organizational changes or future strategic choices. Starting from these consideration our research aims to create a methodology and a dashboard of analysis in order to support managers in making an accurate and realistic impact analysis with specific reference to the introduction of new ICTs within a business environment. This paper shows the preliminary results of a work-in-progress research. The research has been conducted through a mixed approach: a desk study (analysis and systematization of state of the art) and a field analysis through four case studies identified by a pool of experts (Community of practice) in order to define the methodology and the tools for the dashboard of analysis