Acknowledgements

We owe a large debt to many colleagues who have supported this work. We would like to thank all at Templeton College, Oxford University, for making it a great place to work and for their kindness over many years. In particular, we would like to thank several people with whom we we have worked closely, and who have influenced what is written here. David Feeny's contribution is most obvious in Chapters 3 and 9, but is much more profound than that. Chris Sauer and Robert Plant have influenced our thinking and contributed to the research for Chapters 7 and 8, while Mary Lacity's work on IT outsourcing helped enormously with Chapter 6.

We would like to thank all the executives at the case study organizations described in this book, and the many other executives, market commentators, students and consultants who have contributed to our understanding of evaluation of IT and e-business over the years. Hopefully, their patience, understanding and insight is reflected at least a little in the contents of this book. Given the surveys, the interviews, the classes and the seminars, we are talking here of many hundreds of people, not all of whom, obviously, can be mentioned by name. Of the more direct contributions, in many cases anonymity was requested, but where this was not the case, then the respondent is gratefully noted in the text. Enormous thanks are also due to Business Intelligence for supporting some of the original research carried out for this book, and for its more recent support for a study with Chris Sauer on building e-business infrastructure, that has influenced some of the thinking in Chapter 9 of the present book.