The Productivity Paradox Revised

The Productivity Paradox, a concept to refer to the lack of return in productivity as investments in Information Technology grew, started to appear in many studies during the 80s. Managers begun to question their investments in technology as there were no evidence of return. This led researchers towards attempts to understand this relationship between productivity and information technology, what produced results confirming, to some extent, the managers’ view.

According to more recent firm-level and country-level researches, this misconception of lack of return in IT investments is becoming outdated (if not already). When taking into account a broader view including intangible aspects of investments and cross-country data from the past through more recent years, researchers have shown that investments in IT, mostly when aligned with business processes and strategies improvements, do result in gain of productivity.

You can read more about the Productivity Paradox at Wikipedia. For a deeper review on the topic, take a look at the paper I wrote (PDF format), after reading some authors working on it. Update: Sorry, I removed this link for personal reasons.