IT Staff Convention 2008:Determining the Return on Investment of Automation

From Provider Notes

Determining the Return on Investment of Automation

Moderator: Jim Cunningham, Information Systems and Computing

Notes: Tejash Patel, Annenberg School for Communications

Jim Cunningham from AIT discussed determining the ROI for automation in the areas of IT, business services, compliance and overall project management.

1. Should ROI calculations only be used by IT projects only or all business processes?
2. How do you calculate returns on investments? Do you consider applying ROI calculations to security privacy, websites, core systems and business projects?
3. Business services use limited amounts of resources for project analysis. For example initial screening prior to making business decisions.
4. The School of Medicine considers cost analysis, pricing, training changes, vendor proposals, and over all benefits along with ROI calculations.
5. Often in teaching and research environments managers find calculating ROI almost impossible.
6. In most cases faculty desire trumps everything else. It is the job of the IT staff to give faculty any resources they want. ROI analysis should not be a determining factor when considering faculty requests.
7. How do we calculate the added value of a new item, project or process? What should we consider when calculating ROI? Examples may be volume, revenue or expense?
8. The School of Medicine asks: “How do we calculate ROI when some of our processes involve things like HIPPA compliance? It's difficult to put a dollar figure on something like that.”
9. Most of the attendees said at the end of the day ROI calculations do not help them.
10. It is the duty of IT staff members to document ROI considerations from a technical perspective and present them to decision makers.
11. IT staff must fully understand the requirements of the users or clietns from the beginning and document these to avoid having to make changes later. This upfront work can save time.
12. In some cases, not performing ROI calculations early on can lead to a project being abandoned before completion because it does not meet needs which were not properly anticipated.
13. Ultimately the clients make the decisions. It's your duty to advise them, but their decision is final.
14. Looking at different vendors allows clients to leverage money and cost.
15. ROI measurements throughout the project life cycle are important according to business services. In the long this helps project managers become better at ROI analysis and enables them to make informed decisions.
16. Are you doing ROI calculation/analysis on testing? Most of us don’t think about this.
17. Is ROI calculation worth the time spent doing it? We all have ways of assessing this even if we don't currently use ROI calculations!
18. In many cases the actual ROI doesn't matter as much as who is asking about it. Sometimes IT must perform tasks that do not seem to have ROI benefits simply because of the person who is requesting it.
19. It’s important to know what’s important for the client.

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