Technology ROI
Helping organizations realize a better return on their technology spend
Every organization today is concerned with real return on investment (ROI). When business and IT executives develop their annual budgets, they typically tie those budgets to specific results they want to achieve. Too often we discover that annual IT expenditures deliver far less value than either business or IT leaders expected or desired during the planning phases.
Cogentes has conducted qualitative and quantitative market research with many organizations about the specifics of this issue. Different organizations report differing levels of satisfaction with ROI, especially depending on who you talk to inside the business. Business executives who only expect IT to provide a support role for the business frequently report satisfactory levels of ROI. However, business executives who expect IT to provide strategic value, assist or lead in penetrating new markets, and positively impact employee productivity and innovation, often report lower levels of satisfaction with ROI. We frequently found discrepancies between business and IT leaders on this issue.
Throughout these interviews, we consistently observed situations such as:
- Technology expenditures overall do not produce the results the business desires for some organizations.
- We discovered that many organizations do not set clearly defined financial objectives for specific IT initiatives, measure the progress of those initiatives against objectives at pre-defined intervals, or compare financial results of those initiatives against goals at the end of the project and over the following quarters. Without this information, it is virtually impossible to assess true project-level ROI.
- Budgets are consistently exceeded project to project at some firms.
- Staffing costs are very substantial, often in the multiple millions of dollars annually, to manage broken business processes and often these costs are not reflected on IT’s budget statement.
- Rushed technology purchases to meet pressing business requirements create ROI issues later because the technology systems often don’t deliver the desired value and results the business needs.
- Custom application development takes too long, compared to the timelines the business requires, is very expensive, and ongoing support requirements are a heavy financial burden.
The Cogentes solution
Cogentes addresses these issues by providing expert analysis, creative problem solving, and solutions implementation from our senior consultants. Our approach is to understand how an organization has leveraged its people, process and technology to create value. Specifically, we will:
- Interview key executive and operations staff first and gain a working sense of the business plan objectives.
- Interview IT leaders and understand the IT operations model they have put in place and the history of success of that model.
- Understand the history of investments in people, process, and technology to see what the money path tells us about culture, values and decision-making strategy.
- Analyze everything we learn from the discovery process and uncover where the fundamental disconnects lie between business objectives and the actual operating model.
- Rationalize the best possible approach for closing the gap between the intended results and the actual results of the operating model.
- Create an implementation plan to substantially narrow the gap between intended and actual results by developing new approaches to leveraging people, process and technology.
- Work with our clients to implement the plan we’ve developed.
- Make adjustments to the plan based on actual business operating conditions.
- Monitor the success of the plan over time and continue to refine it as necessary.
