The Role of Evaluation in Ensuring Excellence in Communications and Information Technology Initiatives

This article presents an approach to the evaluation of communications and information technology (CIT) programmes in which the evaluation makes a positive contribution to ensuring excellence in the programme. After a brief introduction outlining changing attitudes to the commissioning of evaluations of CIT policy initiatives in the last 20 years, the article explores the politicised purposes of evaluations, the kinds of knowledge that sponsors may be seeking, and the need for evaluations to use a mixture of quantitative and qualitative methods. Characteristic problematic features of CIT programmes are then outlined, relating both to their products and their processes. This section deals with cultural differences, due to the diverse disciplinary, institutional, and often national, backgrounds of their programme teams. It is suggested that the resulting complexity makes it essential for evaluators to intervene in ways that prevent these problems from undermining the potential of CIT programmes to achieve excellence. In the final section, there is a short review of some of the relevant literature on programme evaluation, followed by an account of recent evaluation studies of CIT programmes. The article ends with detailed discussion of the components of the suggested model of evaluation to ensure excellence, derived from the author's experience as an evaluator and influenced by her reading of the research literature.