ROI (Return On Investment) is a quick and useful model to aid your decision making process. Unfortunately, many organisations find it hard to quantify benefits in dollars and sense. Many mid-level management are not able to request or compute ROI to determine if you should proceed with the user request.
Quantifiable Investments
Most people find ROI computation overwhelming and time consuming. However, once you start to build your library of quantifiable investments. You will find ROI easier to be computed. A major push in implementing ROI comes from Cloud Computing where you can see a dashboard of your existing investments. An advantage of cloud allows you to collate and link all your organisation investments to your consumption metrics. The next step is the tricky part in which you must map to your qualitative returns.
Making Sense of the Returns
Many cloud metrics are not relatable to business returns values. For instance, a data transfer metric 1 Gb/month makes no sense to a business users who are not really concern of what 1 Gb is. A more relatable metric will translate to how much the order can cost for its documents. This is where the role of SME (Subject Matter Expert) comes in, to make sense of the returns to business.
Cloud advantages of computing investments is a key reason to make the switch to cloud platform. However, you will need to take extra efforts to translate and make sense of your returns in these investments. Do not be surprised if your computation does not translate to a positive returns. This is because you could have excluded other benefits like upgrades or maintenance cost.
Danny Kwok 