SUPPORTING DYNAMIC REUSE IN BUSINESS CASE DEVELOPMENT

Business case development (BCD) is a complex activity, which can potentially be improved by supporting the reuse of investment criteria and valuation methods. The goal of this research was to improve the usefulness and usability of business case frameworks (BCFs), while limiting the effort required to develop and maintain static databases of reusable components. Therefore, an approach was proposed for the dynamic reuse of business case components and contrasted with static reuse of business case components. In the dynamic approach, the reusable, domain-specific criteria and methods do not need to be pre-defined by experts in templates and taxonomies, but can be reused from earlier business cases. To test whether support for dynamic reuse improves BCFs, a usability experiment was set up. Three types of support for the reuse of criteria were compared: (1) recommendations, based on collaborative filtering and representative for the dynamic approach, (2) templates, representative for the static approach, and (3) no support. The task represented a simplified BCD activity and was completed by 208 people. The main results show that although the recommendations are as effective as the templates, they are the preferred type of support.