Deep dive into the Information Management through 5W2H - discover the How much (ROI) - Part 4

You should probably have thought in the last months and years how much information we have been produced and how much data we are consuming right now. It's excellent for everyone, from baby boomers to millennials, having all information needed in our smartphones and smartwatches. However, have you imagined where and how these massive data are stored and managed? The first shot could be in your iCloud profile or some similar mechanism. But if you shift this approach to your corporation, it will certainly not work.

This article is one of the most important of the series (please read here the others: 1 - What and Why ... you should manage and structure the information produced in your company; 2- Who and How ... to define the key aspects to have a sucessful business strategy; 3 - When ... is the right time to launch your strategy). This article we will talk about how much and how you can evaluate your ROI - return of invesment for your EIM strategy.

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Initially, a list of the benefits of a information management strategy may have tangible and intangible resources. The following benefits will definitely help you develop your business case.

• Tangible - include impactful benefits such as data storage costs, scanning costs, tools to share information internally or externally. Also, attach a realistic value to these, for example, “a document management system will reduce our information storage costs by 10-20%”.
• Less Tangible - you can include other significant, but less measurable returns, for example, due the faster access to information, the processess are streamlined, thus employees are able to be more productive. According to the Gartner ("Improve Efficiency and Productivity"), if we consider employees spend in average 40% of their time looking for the information they need to do their jobs, you are freeing up 16 hours a week.
• Intangible - despite the fact that it is hard to put value in some benefits, you can list them, as well as easy IT adminsitration, due a single solution to manage (cloud or on-premise); improved security, through diverse policies and rules; compliance and regulation adherence, avoiding possible fines and litigations; scalability enabled, in a agile and diversified market where merge and acquisition occurs all the time.

Of course, for a business case and to perform a ROI study, we need tangible benefits, however, remember the John Hayes' quote: “We tend to overvalue the things we can measure and undervalue the things we cannot”.

Well, considering some of the tangible benefits described above, you can evaluate in the following manner.

Let's supose that you're considering for the streamlining of the processes that 100 employees will be impacted; through a system implemented using an EIM strategy, it will reduce up to 40% of their time; calculate the cost per hour to be saved during the whole year.

Secondly, considering for the data storage reduction that you have currently 100TB of information spread into your organization; through a data optimization and rationalization with a solution in place using a EIM strategy, it will reduce 20% of the data in use; calculate the cost per TB of the data to be saved during the whole year.

You can expand for printing and scanning costs reduced by the digitalization of the information, collaborative tools costs reduced by using an unified information platform.

Using this approach you can certainly calculate many benefits of your EIM strategy. In addition with the costs for a software licensing/cloud solution and the project implementation, you will be able to calculate the ROI - return of investment, for your strategy (ROI = costs reduction - costs to implement strategy).

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Please, give your comments, like the post and share with your connections. Keep tuned to the next part of the series of Deep Dive into Information Management, where we talk about the WHERE you can rely on this information management strategy.

•  5. Where ... to rely on information management strategy;