White Paper: Return On Investment from a Competitive Intelligence Software

Many organizations are industrializing the process of competitive Intelligence (CI) by implementing specialized software solutions. Such projects have been flourishing over the last several years, so that today we have the hindsight needed to assess their return on investment.

For a CI project involving a team of 4 to 5 people and a target community of 50 people, it is possible to obtain benefits in the order of 400% to 500% of the initial agreed investment, effective right from the end of the project’s first year. For CI projects deployed throughout entire corporations, involving between 500 and 1000 users, the ROI can quickly attain levels above 1000%, after two or three years of project development.

This document presents a ready-to-use method for assessing the return on investment from a CI project. It has been written by the Digimind consulting team, drawing on their experience in running projects with customers.

"Return on investment from a competitive intelligence software"

• Table of Contents
• Calculating ROI: craft and methods
• ROI applied to software
  • definition
  • use of the ROI
  • establishing the ROI from a software
• ROI, helping to rationalize ci projects
  • problems assessing the ROI from ci software
  • a prerequisite for rationalizing projects
  • clustering of different types of ROI
• the ROI from ci: a rocket with three stages
  • principles
  • industrialize intelligence to reduce costs
  • more information: more precise and more useful
  • towards an intelligent organization
  • conclusions
• Applications
  • ROI through cost reductions and increased quality of information
    • context
    • expected added value
    • ROI calculation
  • CI integrated in the organization: ROI from a collaborative system
    • Context
    • Expected added value
    • ROI calculation