The range and complexity of government information technology (IT) investments makes assessing their returns a daunting prospect. Projects can range from systemwide transformations, to improving financial transparency, to more efficient dog licensing. The returns may be large or small, obvious or obscure, and can run from a few minutes saved in a routine transaction to improving the trust and legitimacy of an entire government.

Assessing the returns remains a core problem in IT planning and decision making. That problem results from shortcomings in the available methods and models for assessing public returns, what we call public return on investment (ROI). In looking over these existing methods and models we saw three significant shortcomings:

•  Incomplete analysis of public value, resulting in too narrow a scope of what can be considered returns to the public.
• Lack of systematic attention to how government IT investments generate results of value from the point of view of the public.
• Weak or absent methods for tailoring a public ROI assessment to the specific context and goals of a government IT investment.

 This white paper presents a public ROI assessment framework that addresses these shortcomings. We call it a public value framework to emphasize the point of view of the public, not the government, as the basis for the assessment.