"It's not -- it's a strategic document" he says. "It's about how you are implementing strategy and the returns you will receive for the funds invested.

"It's also often just a collection of fields; it doesn't actually tell a story or capture the value proposition you are trying to put up. [People] think it's just a grab for cash when, in fact, it is very much the focal point of the project."

Rather than thinking in terms of cost first, benefits later, executives -- not just CIOs -- should be inverting their thinking.

"By swapping those two concepts around, you suddenly get value," Simms says. "Because our research has found that, in the whole end-to-end process, the business case was the greatest destroyer of value."

In fact 46 per cent of CIOs surveyed considered their current business case to be a destroyer of value.