We polled a roomful of attendees at a recent ROI (return on investment) panel discussion with the following question: How many of you must calculate the ROI of a project in order to justify it? Roughly three out of four hands went up.

The message was loud and clear: Heightened corporate scrutiny and accountability over IT spending remain an ongoing challenge for most organizations. We also know from talking to our customers, that business intelligence (BI) projects are saving many of you big money.

We would like to help all of you meet the ROI challenge. You instinctively know that your BI applications are saving you money, but you haven't gotten a handle on the figures. With our new Million Dollar Program, we'll work with your team to help you figure out how much money your BI applications are actually saving you.

We will dispatch an experienced team of financial researchers, interviewers, and facilitators for a structured analysis that will cost, at most, a couple hours of your time. Using publicly available information, we will analyze your organization, pinpointing factors such as fully loaded employee costs. Then we will interview the highest-level individual(s) with hands-on experience in BI, the business processes, or systems in question. The result will be an ROI case study that we will review and adjust with you.

You can learn how much money is being saved, and how. Some of the savings, such as the productivity savings that accrue when employees or managers do not have to hunt or aggregate data on their own, are fairly intuitive. Admittedly, the savings from other benefits, such as improving the customer experience, may be more challenging to quantify. However, given that the cost of a sale to an existing customer is a fraction of what must be spent to acquire a new customer, the savings from improving customer services are also very real.

There are many ways to figure out the savings or financial benefits of BI systems. Some organizations derive ROI from financial metrics such as net present value (NPV), payback period, net benefit, investment rate of return (IRR), specific key performance indicators (KPIs), or total cost of ownership (TCO). However, we also understand that figuring out the ROI is not always simple. For instance, translating factors such as customer satisfaction, improved quality, or time-to-benefit can be challenging to quantify.

Making IT cost-effective has become more important than ever. We know BI saves big money, and now, we will help your team prove it.

Contact Roy Agostino, our vice president of Global Marketing, so that he can include you at no charge in our Million Dollar Program. All we ask is that you sign up right away, as the number of companies we can help is limited.

Thanks to Web technology, organizations of all sizes now have a convenient channel in which to distribute information. The challenge is often figuring out where to start. For many organizations, the HR system becomes the likely candidate because its reach is universal – information on salaries, benefits, and corporate policies impact every employee. The obvious benefit is that the benefits are obvious – with a well-designed HR business intelligence system, the benefits can be visible to everyone who works in the company. Consequently, it becomes easier to imagine how the benefits of BI can be applied elsewhere.

For Orange and Rockland Utilities, a company that has been supplying gas and electricity to New York City's northwestern suburbs for over a century, opening up the company's HR system through WebFOCUS prompted the company to address another stubborn bottleneck: the testing and certification of electric and gas meters that the utility deploys to its customers. Traditionally, this process was highly labor-intensive, involving management of multiple spreadsheets on meter test performance. Furthermore, because the utility services customers in three states, it must reconcile the data to address three sets of regulatory requirements that each carry subtle variations.

With the reporting system, spreadsheets are all managed off a single data source, with information now available on demand based on parameters such as which units were tested in which month. "The new system is very valuable for helping the department with its planning," said Tom Swierczek, project manager in Systems Solutions and Consulting at Orange and Rockland. Success breeds more success. The company is now extending the system to address another pressing problem: power outages. "WebFOCUS will provide graphs, charts, and text for upper management to help keep track of factors like tree and storm outages, the number of residents affected, and how quickly power is restored," said Swierczek.

Etta Levine is editorial director for Information Builders' Insights and editor in chief of Information Builders Magazine. To provide feedback go to www.informationbuilders.com/insightstalkback

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