IT ROI strategies for CIOs

This guide is part of the SearchCIO.com Executive Guide series, which is designed to give IT leaders strategic guidance and advice that addresses the management and decision-making aspects of timely topics. For a complete list of topics covered to date, visit the Executive Guide section.

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VoIP savings in productivity, long-distance charges

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[ Elisabeth Horwitt, Contributor]

About two and a half years ago, Brinks Hofer Gilson & Lione decided it was time to junk its aging Rolm private branch exchange (PBX) and roll out Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) across the company.

The move was long overdue, according to Rod Sagarsee, CIO at the Chicago-based intellectual property law firm. In order to keep the 17-year-old PBX up and running 365 days a year, 24/7 -- a business necessity -- the firm was paying escalating costs in technician overtime, third-party service fees and parts. In addition, moves, adds and changes required changing the wiring at two locations.

After researching the VoIP market for eight months, Brinks chose Avaya Inc.'s VoIP platform. The basic infrastructure, including the main VoIP system, switching backbone and redundant off-site backup system, was installed in January 2006. By early summer 2007, "We had exceeded full ROI from a strict monetary standpoint," Sagarsee said. "If you were to include productivity enhancements, ROI was exceeded from day one."

   Learn more in " VoIP savings seen in productivity and long-distance charges." Also:

• Unified communications offers security, ROI and effectiveness (SearchCIO-Midmarket.com)
  Unified communications was all the talk at VoiceCon in San Francisco. What exactly is it? What are the technical and strategic issues around UC? Associate Editor Jeff Kelly discovered some helpful advice and opinions on UC at the show.
• VoIP security and converged networks: A Special Report for CIOs (SearchCIO.com)
  VoIP has been around long enough that it's no longer considered a risky new technology. Better yet, most CIOs note that the cost justification of upgrading networks -- as well as the ROI -- far outweigh the risks. This Special Report includes articles, tips, a video interview and more on VoIP and converged networks.

Green IT strategies could lead to hefty ROI

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[ Elisabeth Horwitt, Contributor ]

Savvy and forward-thinking CIOs have recognized that ecological concerns aren't just for tree-huggers. Large enterprises, and to a lesser extent midrange companies, are starting to deploy products, and better yet, long-range green IT strategies, to reduce the carbon footprints of data centers. A number of factors are propelling this trend -- one of the biggest is the energy crisis.

On Aug. 2, the Environmental Protection Agency's Energy Star Program released to Congress a report assessing opportunities for energy efficiency improvements for government and commercial computer servers and data centers in the United States.

According to the report, data centers accounted for roughly 1.5% of the country's electricity consumption in 2006. The energy consumption of servers and data centers has doubled in the past five years and is expected to almost double again in the next five years, to more than 100 billion kWh, costing about $7.4 billion annually.

   Find out more in "Green IT strategies could lead to hefty ROI." Also:

• CIOs save green by going green in the data center (SearchCIO.com)
  CIOs who are using green IT options to improve energy efficiencies in their data centers are also seeing improved cost savings.
• Data center energy efficiency strategies for CIOs (SearchCIO.com)
  According to the EPA, data centers will require almost twice as much power by 2011 if current trends continue. What changes can you and your organization make to try to avoid such an outcome? Find out the answer to that and other pressing energy efficiency questions with this Executive Guide.

E-discovery more than just litigation insurance

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[Elisabeth Horwitt, Contributor]

Electronic discovery (e-discovery) is viewed by most businesses as a form of litigation insurance: a means of satisfying the information demands of litigators and government regulators in a timely and cost-effective fashion. This only makes sense, as no company wants to suffer potential multimillion-dollar judgments or regulatory penalties.

More and more corporate IT executives, however, are beginning to use e-discovery internally for a different purpose: to fill the increasingly complex and costly internal information needs of their own end users.

E-discovery products use data classification and search techniques that vendors claim are far more sophisticated than simple keyword searches used in most archiving systems, and even powerful Web search engines like Google Inc.'s. The results are better organized corporate data and more accurate search results.

   Learn more in "E-discovery more than just litigation insurance." Also:

• Email etiquette policies: Big savings and productivity (SearchCIO-Midmarket.com)
  Email makes the world go 'round, but without an email etiquette plan, productivity and collaboration can make you spin into information overload.
• Email Archiving: Analyzing the Return on Investment (SearchCIO.com)
  With the increased usage of emails, many organizations are relying on the temporary storage repositories within email systems. Since these systems were not designed to store vast amounts of email and associated attachments for long durations, many organizations face numerous IT problems associated with an overloaded email system, including system down time, bloated inboxes, mailbox size limits and lost data due to .PST/.NSF corruption.

Disaster recovery plans bring peace of mind, ROI

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[Herman Mehling, Contributor]

A disaster recovery (DR) plan is a bit like car insurance -- you don't realize its value until you're in an accident. The worse the damage, the higher the cost of repair, the more you appreciate your insurance ... and your DR plan.

But determining your company's specific DR needs is a complicated affair. In formulating comprehensive DR plans, CIOs face a myriad of challenges, not the least of which is determining ROI.

"The cost of creating and maintaining a DR plan is clear, but the ROI will not be tangible until a disaster strikes," said Mike Colesante, president of Terian Solutions LLC, a Houston-based provider of managed backup services. "It is difficult to calculate a quantitative return from a benefit that has a probability associated with it. With a DR plan, you are paying for the peace of mind it brings you."

   Find out more in "Disaster recovery plans bring peace of mind, ROI." Also:

• Business execs undercut value of disaster recovery planning (SearchCIO.com)
  When it comes to disaster recovery CIOs get it, business execs don't. Not only do they undercut the importance of such planning, but they also fail to understand how technology failures can affect their companies, says a new survey conducted by Harris Interactive Inc. and sponsored by SunGard Availability Services.
• Disaster recovery: Ad hoc and expensive (SearchStorage.com)
  Users at Gartner's storage show admit that their disaster recovery plans are unrehearsed and too expensive.

Mobile technologies: Creating a business plan

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[Cindy Atoji, Contributor]

The lure of mobile technologies is magnetic, with its promises of seamless communication and increased responsiveness. But achieving ROI from mobile devices -- whether it's personal digital assistants, mobile phones, data cards or Pocket PCs -- requires strategic purchasing, deployment and support planning, according to experts.

The key to a compelling business plan for a mobile technology is determining its key benefits and building a deployment approach to ensure maximum returns, said Rebecca Wettemann, a vice president at Nucleus Research Inc. in Wellesley, Mass. Instead of a lengthy laundry list of 20 to 30 benefits, focus on the two or three most important gains you hope to achieve. "These include increased productivity, reduction in administrative or communication costs, improved efficiencies," Wettemann said.

Assess the project by "breadth" (how many employees or customers will be helped by the application) and "repeatability" (frequency of application use), with the objective of maximizing benefits, not minimizing costs, Wettemann added.

   Learn more in "Mobile technologies: Creating an effective business plan." Also:

• Mobile device management: Leveraging existing investments (SearchMobileComputing.com)
  A growing number of corporations make significant investments in products to enable their help desk and IT personnel to maintain and manage enterprise resources such as servers, desktops, laptops, applications and networks. These management products ensure that enterprise resources consistently function correctly and are available for updates as necessary, and they ensure that the help desk can effectively troubleshoot, diagnose and repair machines remotely.
• Firm eases pain of patch management for mobile workforce (SearchCIO.com)
  Companies with complex IT environments and a large number of mobile and remote workers often find the deployment of software patches labor intensive and incomplete.

More resources

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• Resource Center: ROI (SearchCIO.com)
• Tips: ROI Strategies (SearchCIO.com)