December, 2005

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The Benefits of Business Intelligence

The ROI Guy

As a result of implementing business intelligence applications, organizations are gaining key business value advantages ranging from simple cost avoidance, such as saving on the labor, printing and distributing reports, to competitive advantage, such as recognizing hot selling items quickly enough to respond to customer demands and avoid “out-of-stock” conditions.

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The ROI Risks of VoIP

The ROI Guy

VoIP projects indeed can deliver great cost savings and empower the business for greater agility, applications and capabilities. But these projects are not without their risks. These typically include: 1. Network readiness is often under-estimated resulting in higher that expected upgrade investments required in network equipment and connectivity 2.

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The Benefits of RFID

The ROI Guy

The costs for implementing RFID are still too high for most mainstream applications, but are falling. While the costs and risks might be too high to deploy in a production environment, the benefits are proving more apparent and many should be conducting research projects to begin determining the potential ROI. Here is a quick checklist of several benefits which can be achieved with RFID solutions: 1.

Benefit 40
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The ROI of HR Self Service Applications

The ROI Guy

Here are a few suggested HR applications you may wish to consider for self-service enablement Employee self-service applications ? Retiree services ? Paid time off requests ? Electronic paystubs ? Withholding changes and deductions ? Time card entry ? Personal data maintenance ? Training registration ? Benefit inquiries ? Open enrollment ? 401(k) or pension services ?

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The Trends You Need to Succeed This Holiday Season

October Prime Day is usually an early sign of how consumer spending trends ahead of the holidays. This one was no exception. Our October Prime Day Report breaks down what’s working: the products flying off the shelves, the categories winning big, big brands, and the search terms defining demand. All brought to you via Similarweb’s Shopper Intelligence platform.

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The Benefits of Storage Consolidation

The ROI Guy

Storage consolidation consists of migrating distributed storage on individual servers to a networked NAS and/or SAN solution. The following are a few of the possible benefits: Reduce Storage Capacity and Growth Costs Adding storage to handle growth can be expensive, especially in high growth environments: 1) Reduce Needed Headroom - Distributed storage on individual servers require headroom on each disk array – islands of unused capacity.

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The ROI for Anti-Spam

The ROI Guy

The spam issue has reached such epidemic proportions that if its growth goes unabated, it can potentially ruin the utility and business value of e-mail. Nearly 36% of all e-mail messages received today are spam, according to NetIQ Corp.'s recent study of 750 small and large organizations worldwide. That's a sixfold increase over the past three years.

ROI 40
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Q&A for SearchCIO: The State of ROI from IT

The ROI Guy

Between utility computing and offshore outsourcing, it's a pretty safe bet that the data center of tomorrow won't look like the data center of today. What can CIOs do to prepare for the inevitable evolution? In this interview, Tom Pisello, founder, CEO and president (basically "The Man") of Orlando, Fla.-based Alinean LLC, a company that develops tools to measure IT value and ROI, talks to SearchCIO.com about which current trends merit attention -- and what CIOs should be doing to stay ahead of

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Does Size Matter in ROIT?

The ROI Guy

It's a long-held theory that larger companies have an advantage over smaller ones in IT spending, largely because of their ability to tap economies of scale. They can spend less and extract more value from investments. Recent research supports the notion that size does matter but that companies investing the most in IT are not always the winners. In fact, on average, the most successful small and midsized (SMBs) companies are more frugal than the average large company when it comes to spending a

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Don't just cut IT spending - Use IT to reduce SG&A is best way to cut costs

The ROI Guy

Reducing IT costs is a great idea and all, but maybe you should take a closer look at administrative expenses instead. That's the advice from Alinean Research. The ROI consultancy, based in Orlando, Fla., crunched several years' worth of financial data from 10,000 publicly held companies and found that IT departments have indeed reduced costs through consolidation and cutbacks.

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AI Strategies for Sales Managers: How to Cut Down on Tedious Admin Work

What if you could help your sellers stop wasting 72% of their day on non-selling activities and focus on bringing in revenue? Incorporating AI in your enablement workflows can help you cut down on busy work, get projects done faster, and let your team (and you!) focus on making a bigger impact. We put together this guide to show you how to use AI to cut time and costs for projects, including collateral creation, development of training videos, and automating tedious processes.

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Ten Steps to High ROIT

The ROI Guy

1) Think like the CEO. Focus on the business first. This will affect your competitive advantage. 2) Communicate in stakeholder-specific terms, such as "competitive advantage," "growth," "income statement," "TCO" and "key business metrics." 3) Think strategically. Create a competitive analysis. Compare your company to others in the industry. Be aware of where you stand, and communicate that to your board. 4) Know where your company stands in terms of things like net income vs.

ROI 40
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The ROI of Business Intelligence

The ROI Guy

Companies have spent millions on transactional systems to help automate key business processes. While these systems generate enormous amounts of valuable information, they often have poor reporting capabilities, inhibiting the sharing of key information -- like demand forecasting, inventory levels, error rates, finances and budgets. The most common way for organizations to analyze and report on valuable business data is through spreadsheets.

ROI 40
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The ROI of Server Consolidation and Virtualization

The ROI Guy

There's a huge opportunity for IT budget savings by reducing IT labor requirements – primarily administration and support. In fact, more than 70% of the total cost of ownership (TCO) for typical data centers is for labor or outsourced services. The high cost of labor, particularly performing mundane administrative and support tasks, is one of the key reasons why little of the IT budget is left for innovative projects that can help deliver competitive value.

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IT Does Matter

The ROI Guy

Nick Carr's argument that IT initiatives are no longer a source of corporate competitive advantage is both right and wrong. True, many IT purchases are commoditized buys that don't lift an organization past its peers. But the fundamental mistake in Carr's thesis is that all IT investments are a commodity, and should therefore be cut because they don't drive business value.

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Buyer’s Guide: 5 Tough Questions To Ask a Salesforce Managed Services Provider

This guide is for leaders who recognize the importance of Salesforce but would rather trust a team of external experts to do the heavy lifting. Choosing the right managed services provider is a significant decision that impacts your business's efficiency and success. In this 10-minute read, you'll find 5 essential questions to ask any potential provider.

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The ROI for Information Lifecycle Management (ILM)

The ROI Guy

With consolidation to storage area networks and advances in storage management software packages, the concept of hierarchies and intelligent management like information lifecycle management (ILM) is again at the forefront of storage architecture planning. ILM is a growing set of recommended practices and technologies that allow companies to manage data more efficiently and effectively.

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CIOs: Winning the Budget Battle

The ROI Guy

CIOs at organizations of all sizes are prepared to go into budget battle -- competing for precious few dollars to fund routine IT needs and hopefully some innovative initiatives. Even while the predictions for IT spending look promising for the next year, overall available funding is going to be tight, as revenue falls victim to the whims of an uncertain and unstable economy.

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Selling with ROI

The ROI Guy

IT vendors have accepted the fact that closing deals today requires proving that their products deliver substantial value. But, with some budget relief in sight for this year, vendors may be optimistic about the return of the happy days of pre-bubble selling -- and they could abandon their commitment to ROI-based selling programs. Unfortunately, most of the recent IT budget increases will not materialize into a spending windfall, and scarce dollars are already allocated to meet backlogged demand

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The ROI from CRM

The ROI Guy

Getting analysts to agree on the potential returns of CRM is nearly impossible. Several reports recently published claimed that the return on investment (ROI) from recent CRM implementations had been dismal, with eight out of 10 projects failing to deliver on ROI promises, and project failure rates typically running between 50% and 70%. Other reports were more optimistic, estimating that about 70% of companies said their CRM initiatives had exceeded original ROI expectations.

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Beyond the Basics: How to Develop and Retain a Top-Performing Sales Team

Speaker: Brendan Sweeney, VP of Sales at Allego

Maximizing sales rep performance is no easy task. 📈 Traditional sales training methods focus heavily on the first few weeks in the sales role. Companies dedicate time, resources, and budget to onboarding new hires, only for them to forget what was learned in those first few weeks, lose motivation, and struggle to come to grips with their role.

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The ROI of RFID

The ROI Guy

The promise of RFID is the dream of every supply chain manager -- enabling the accurate real-time tracking of every single product, from manufacture to checkout. Compared to universal product code (UPC) bar coding, which it promises to replace, RFID proactively transmits information, eliminating the manual point-and-read operations needed with bar coding.

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CIO to CFO: Extreme Makeover

The ROI Guy

Everyone loves a good makeover. Perhaps the CIO could benefit from one. With the help of a 'keen eye' and some pointed advice, these embattled executives need to shift focus to what's really the most important criteria for IT and business success. A recent Empirimetric analysis (contributions to profitability as surveyed by the PIMS Program from the Empirimetric Corporation – 2002) of 3,000 business units from more than 300 corporations found that operating effectiveness (also known as "the abil

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The ROI SLA: Assuring Value Delivery

The ROI Guy

The rules for IT spending have changed significantly in the past 18 months and financial accountability is the new name of the game. Many vendors see ROI analysis as the way to arm prospects with a dollar-driven business case needed to win C-suite approval. Unfortunately, many IT professionals are finding that even the most robust vendor ROI tools aren't enough to stand up under the increased levels of financial scrutiny.

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Predictions for 2006: What should an SMB IT Executive Expect for the New Year

The ROI Guy

Its all about top-line growth – SMBs will be tasked to focus much more on front office, customer facing applications to help drive business growth. For many, this will be a 180 degree turn from the prior year’s focus on improving business efficiency via back office investments. From our analysis most IT groups are still focusing 70 to 80% of their investments on back office applications, and a meager 10% on innovation.

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How to Optimize Call Monitoring: Automate QA and Elevate Customer Experience

Speaker: Laura Noonan, Chief Revenue Officer at CallFinder + Angie Kronlage, Director of Program Success at Working Solutions + April Wiita, Vice President of Program Success at Working Solutions

Are you still manually reviewing calls? 🤔 It's time for a change! The traditional method of manual call monitoring is no longer cutting it in today's fast-paced call center environment. Industry experts Angie Kronlage and April Wiita from Working Solutions are here to explore the power of innovative automation to revolutionize outdated call review processes!

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CIOs are from Mars, CFOs are from Venus

The ROI Guy

According to recent Gartner / Meta Group polls of the top CIO Priorities for 2005, three of the top five goals are related to proving and improving the returns from IT investments. These include improving value management, achieving greater business / IT alignment, and improving portfolio management (scorecards of investment options to optimize value while reducing risks).

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IT Budget Time: Getting YES from a frugal CFO

The ROI Guy

IT spending is expected to grow again for the second straight year, with average 5-8% increases expected again for 2006. As a result, the IT budgeting process should be easier than in years past. Corporations have cash to spend, and for some businesses such as finance, technology, professional services, retail and others where IT is an essential component of competitive advantage getting executives to invest more in IT will be easier than ever.

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Will the real TCO please stand up!

The ROI Guy

There have been many conflicting TCO reports claiming one solution is cheaper than another, particularly with regard to Microsoft Windows versus Linux. Can these contradictory analyst reports be trusted? When an analyst develops these reports they often interview particular customers, some provided by the vendor, others independently assessed. For each interview a particular configuration is assessed and the costs analyzed.

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Small Company ROI: How to get the CEO to Yes

The ROI Guy

Any solution worth investing in will typically help the business drive revenue, improve productivity or save money. The key to any initiative you want others to consider for approval is to verify the benefits and then document the value of the solution compared to its costs to the organization. A simple business case would consist of the following topics covered to provide the executive with the business criteria they need to make sure the decision is well founded and can deliver value. 1.

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Secrets of a Successful Sale: Optimizing Your Checkout Process

Speaker: David Nisbet, Everett Zufelt, and Michaela Weber

Once upon a time, in the vast realm of online commerce, there lived a humble checkout button overlooked by many. Yet, within its humble click lay the power to transform a mere visitor into a loyal customer. 🧐 💡 Getting checkout right can mark the difference between a successful sale and an abandoned cart, yet many businesses fail to make payments a part of their commerce strategy even when it has a direct impact on revenue.

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Its not just about the Technology; IT Professionals Really do Matter

The ROI Guy

One of the new top priorities for CIOs is people. At least that’s what the attendees at the SIM national 2005 conference in Boston indicate, and many IT professionals applaud the new sentiment. Being a technical professional was once a glamorous and rewarding career path. But that was pre-bubble, pre-outsourcing and pre-offshoring. During the cost cutting of the past five years IT departments have been viewed as cost centers, falling victim to annual staff reductions, leading to severe morale an

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Got Leads? Here are a few Guidelines for High Tech IT Marketers

The ROI Guy

Lead development is always harder and more expensive resource-wise than anyone realizes. There are no silver bullet solution to getting prospects and filling a sales pipeline with good, quality leads.However, there are resources that can help. Finding companies with a need: Sales intelligence software can help sales professionals find the right companies, those with specific business opportunities that the company can address.

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Vendor ROI: Can it be trusted?

The ROI Guy

As an IT buyer you often don't have time to do your own ROI analyses, and often rely a lot on vendors to help. But, can vendor ROI analyses be trusted? The simple answer is yes and no. Just like a reporter putting together a news story, your reliance on vendor ROI analyses depends on having a credible source and questioning/validating the facts. You should not accept just any solution provider's ROI as gospel; however, working with a good solution provider in partnership and using their ROI anal

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