This is part two of a series about calculating ROI for investing in innovative software
Great organizations are data-driven
Having access to better intelligence is one thing, but applying it to critical problems is another. That’s where great organizations shine: they incorporate data, information, and intelligence into their decision-making processes to challenge assumptions, validate outcomes, and move forward with confidence. It also allows them to build alignment and trust because they bring together the wisdom of their individual contributors, teams, and corporate divisions.
Consider how much data is created in a single day, month, and year at your company. Some Sitetracker customers make millions of updates per week as they move projects forward, update timelines, record expenses, and more. Adding that to prior years data, stored in email servers, shared drives, different versions of files, and various databases means that even mid-size organizations probably have multiples of the Library of Congress in data that they could leverage.
So, how can they make something of all that data? How do they separate the signal from the noise? An important part is embracing performance management: a purposeful and iterative way to measure inputs and outputs to manage effectively and align means with ends. But to embrace performance management, organizations must first enable it.
Enable performance management
To manage performance, you must first be able to measure it. This requires a set of tools and processes in place that make the collection, reporting, and analysis of information easy, repeatable, and scalable.
Regarding tools, this means that the entire organization should be working in one system for a given function, that anyone can easily create reports and dashboards in that system, that reports can be scheduled to refresh at regular intervals, and that people can actually “drill down” into the underlying data.
Regarding processes, the following sections will help you implement a performance management program and ask the right questions, which will help you identify hidden costs and provide a comprehensive understanding of your business to inform ROI calculation.
To gain further insight into how you can get a return on investment from innovative software, contact us.
