How long is a piece of string? More specifically, how long is an acceptable return on investment?
Chances are you used to have more time. If you’re responsible for IT, you used to have time to think, buy, implement and wait. You’d have a period of time – not necessarily strictly defined – to prove ROI.
Now, eveything has changed. The downturn has sharpened everyone’s desire to see quick wins; if technology can’t pay for itself quickly why would the business bother paying?
The change in economic conditions has been matched by the pace of change in IT, with the business now able to draw on a series of consumer, social and cloub-based technologies that would have seemed impossible just a few years ago.
The result is a severe shortening in the time horizon for ROI. Business cases simply must show a quick ROI – six months is acceptable, two years is far too vague.
Does this shortening of ROI time frames sound familiar? How do you prove ROI in an age of fast-changing economic and technological conditions? And what do such changes mean for the role of the person responsible for running IT?
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How on earth did you ever *prove* RoI? Does the business and economy have to be frozen in place while your changes demonstrate their value? Do we do this for marketing? For process changes? Maybe it is not ROI timescales that are the issue so much as the prices people had been paying for solutions. A piece of software costs the supplier no more if it is used by 1 person, 500 people or 50,000 yet people pay per seat/use software licences. People over-specify equipment because a few people might use it, upgrade working solutions because “they needed upgrading”, follow the latest hype solution despite the last one never having a chance to bed in. All these things drive costs high, make projects have a big ticket price.
And when the economy was booming, all projects had a decent chance of a good ROI over two years, despite their costs; now what is really needed is to find incrementally lower cost ways of delivering on the organisation’s products and services instead of big ticket projects. Regardless of brand or reduced status through lower budgets.
Good point, as ever, Chris. The IT industry certainly hasn’t helped itself in the past. Costly ‘solutions’ that needed constant upgrades. And projects that totally failed, and which no one cared about while times were good. Maybe the cloud’s the answer (or maybe not…)?
Write an article on whether the cloud is the answer and I’ll comment on it. Approximate summary likely response is below.
[Caution, plot-spoiler follows]
No.
Impressively succinct…!