On the Need for Evolvability Assessment in Value Management

Contemporary organizations need to dynamically adapt to their rapidly changing environment. This imposes challenges to the entire organization, including its supporting information systems (IS). However, current value management practices pay little attention to evolvability issues within the evaluation and deployment of information technology dependent strategic initiatives (ITDSIs). In this paper, we explore how the evolvability of an information technology (IT) application can be assessed and which practices might be affected if an organization is willing to address this issue. For this purpose, we propose a set of five specific management guidelines. These should lead to ITDSIs yielding more evolvable information systems to an organization, and hence enable the organization to more easily adapt to its environment, providing a competitive advantage.