Defining ROI for BI

Over the years, ROI calculations have been created by many and adapted within organizations to justify BI project spending, implementation, and expansion. Unfortunately, beyond-

Over the years, ROI calculations have been created by many and adapted within organizations to justify BI project spending, implementation, and expansion. Unfortunately, beyond-

• Cost savings – as mentioned above and may include hardware/software, licensing, maintenance fees, etc.
• Time savings – employee production and better decision making
• Process automation – includes the time saved on report/analytics creation

it can be hard to ascertain qualitative benefits of BI.  Companies feel that they are better able to make decisions based on the increase in information visibility, but attaching this to revenue growth and overall productivity is not always easy. For instance, marketers are constantly trying to identify the success of their marketing campaigns.  This may include defining the correlation between individual campaigns and lead generation or online marketing activities or advertisements and an increase in sales.  Unfortunately, it is not always easy to identify where opportunities are generated and the correlations that exist between marketing initiatives and sales.

The same difficulty exists in identifying ROI for BI.  How do organizations define the extra value they incur through BI adoption and calculate ROI to take into account the additional factors that bring added business value beyond the quantifiable BI benefits?

Please share your BI ROI success stories.