Introduction

Information technology (IT) has become crucial for the support, sustainability and growth of businesses and vital for achieving competitive advantage (Weill and Broadbent, 1998; De Haes and Van Grembergen, 2009; Chang et al., 2011).

Consequently, companies are motivated to invest more in technology – acquiring systems, installing databases, and using the internet and electronic commerce in their business operations. A key challenge for business executives is how to appropriately allocate scarce resources to those investments and to evaluate their appropriateness and value.

Gunasekaran et al. (2006) point out that IT managers have used several methods and techniques to evaluate IT investments, ranging from simple computational formulas to complex techniques that combine quantitative and qualitative analyses. Information technology portfolio management (ITPM) is one technique for identifying, analyzing and managing IT investments (Maizlish and Handler, 2005). Organizations can use ITPM to manage IT from an investment perspective, aligned with a continuous focus on business (Peters and Verhoef, 2008). According to Burke and Shaw (2008), ITPM is an important research issue in the IT field. However, the concept has only recently begun to be widely discussed in IT research (Cho and Shaw, 2009). The importance of ITPM in business practice is illustrated by the fact that the Brazilian edition of InformationWeek published a ranking of the most innovative companies, using ITPM as one of the categories. But as Kumar et al. (2008) pointed out, few studies exist in the IT literature about the use of this technique in companies. It is considered an underdeveloped concept.