This is part one of a series about calculating ROI for purchasing innovative software
As the saying goes, knowledge is power. But information that you don’t have access to is practically information you don’t have at all. It’s one thing to have vital information stored in asset management systems, accounting systems, and similar point solutions. It’s another to be able to actually use the information in those systems.
This is why the concept of a single source of truth is so valuable:
Having the right information at your fingertips at the right time means you can get answers quickly and efficiently.
Likewise, having a single source of truth goes a long way toward driving alignment within your organization. Instead of spending time debating facts or waiting until the next meeting because someone had to do a research project to gather critical information, you and your team can work from the same set of facts and decide what to do next, not what has been done already.
Think about what it takes to pull together a report on project statuses and their downstream effects. For most organizations, it means manually assembling information from many disparate trackers in spreadsheets and reports from antiquated in-house systems (which in turn may require IT resources to create those reports). Assembling the data, merging it together, creating the appropriate charts and graphs, and writing summaries is a laborious, time-intensive process. Formulas must be checked for errors, tables must be referenced properly, and all that assumes that you’re working from the latest version of the data. Are you really sure that’s the case? Unfortunately, with such a manual process, the report is likely outdated as soon as it’s finished.
