By Freya Purnell
Making a strong business case for investment in an SAP change control solution is about combining both hard and soft dollar return on investment (ROI) measures, according to Rick Porter, vice president business development, Revelation Software Concepts.
Porter will be outlining these ideas in a live webinar, ‘SAP Change Control Automation: Is the Economic Benefit Based on Hard Dollars or on Soft Dollars?’, on Thursday 30 July.
“We will look at several current CIO priorities, and then show how you can convert software functionality into a business case than can actually help you meet CIO priorities, while getting a return on investment at the same time,” Porter said.
While hard dollar ROI on areas such as production incident avoidance, automation benefits and so on, are easier to calculate, soft dollar ROI – such as development efficiencies, improved employee morale, or audit success – is more difficult to place a number on, but still has value.
“Some CIOs are looking to move towards things – in other words, achieve particular metrics such as delivering software change to the business quicker; while others actually want to avoid things like audit failures or not meeting their SLA metrics,” Porter said.
While often CIOs want to implement change control systems because they are dissatisfied with not meeting project objectives, for example, or getting pressure from other areas of the business because the production system goes down too often, they will often look to the hard dollars to justify the investment decision.
“In the end, it’s a mix of hard and soft dollars, and understanding what they are can help you put together the business case, and you can include some of those emotional soft dollar benefits without being particularly pointed about them,” Porter said.
When creating business cases, it can also be important to establish baseline metrics on selected data points before the implementation of the solution, to provide a point of comparison once it has been running for a period of time.
“If you’re going to do something differently – for example, moving from a six-monthly release program to a monthly agile program, having the metrics for before and after mean you can see whether your production system is better than before, has the volume of change increased, are you detecting errors in development, before they get to QA or production? All these things have significant dollar savings,” Porter says.
The webinar will provide a methodology and practical examples on how to take a CIO or business priority, understand which software function will achieve the outcome, map out the operational change that will take place, and demonstrate what value and ROI can be realised as a result.
And while the webinar will be focused on SAP change control automation, Porter said the methodology can easily be applied to just about any type of software deployment.
Find out more about the webinar and register here.
