Pre and Post Evaluations on IT Platform Migration to Open Systems

IT platform migration to open systems (IPMO) bears a great deal of risk over all the associated processes, in terms of a major IT investment. Hence it requires empirical data and references for decision making. Although there have been a number of published papers encouraging or discouraging IPMO, the studies that deliver useful empirical evidence for IPMO decisions are rare. The obvious first step to resolve this problem would be to gain lessons from the organizations who experienced IPMO. Based on the Delphi study, we examine both the pre and post evaluations on IPMO benefits and risks and analyze the underlying reasons of different evaluations from different stages. Our results identify the most important factor the organizations should seriously consider, and which factor is easy to neglect at the ex-ante appraisal stage.