By Carrie Foreman
This is not necessarily an easy question to answer. The cost of procuring, operating, and supporting platforms can vary widely as there are so many options available on the market. Do you even know if that investment has been spent in the best way? Answer these five questions to help you decide if the platform you are running represents a good return on investment, and if not, we have included some ideas for what you can do to improve it.
What was the main driver for purchasing the software in the first place? Why did you choose the products in question? Often we find that organisations requirements change over time so it is important to establish if the software is still fit for the intended and original purpose in addition to those new use cases .
Once you have established if the software is still the right fit for your organisations objectives, you can accurately assess whether the usage and outcomes from the software represent a reasonable ROI.
Employees are the backbone of any organisation. When considering your analytics platform there are some key questions that you should be asking about your employees that can directly affect your ROI.
If the answer to all of these questions is yes, then that could indicate that your investment is on track, but from our experience that is not always the case. It is also very important to keep asking these questions as your user base and usage will change over time. We regularly find that the users don’t always have the best perception of the platform and worse yet, are quite happy to live with their frustrations and not raise it. Whether this is due to regular issues, lack of training or outdated software it is massively important to keep the users engaged, make sure their voice is heard and given importance, as it has a direct correlation with productivity.
This goes hand-in-hand with reviewing the perception of the platform. Setting up best practises from the start can not only increase efficiency of the users, but also boosts morale of the team as it reduces duplication of work and clarifies expectations around roles. We have found that running a tailored training course on best practice or coding efficiencies workshop is a great way of increasing your ROI. It provides the users with a forum to ask questions, share efficiencies around how they can make their processes run faster, promote reuse and maximise data storage, all of which are productivity enablers.
Are there any current issues with the platform that might be stopping your organisation from achieving the ROI? We often find organisations that have not maintained their platform fully result in outdated versions of software and end of life products being used which can lead to potential compliance issues. Regular health checks are extremely important for enterprise systems. These help ensure that not only is the platform kept up-to-date, but that performance issues and platform failures can be proactively managed before it becomes a problem. It is so much more expensive to fix a problem when it has happened, so best to try and avoid it in the first place!
Lastly, if your analytics platform was switched off for a day, week or month how would this affect your organisation? What is the value that the analytics platform provides to the business? For some organisations analytics drive business critical processes and inform business decisions, such that a catastrophic failure could well impact the ability to continue business operations effectively. We have had incidents raised in the past where financial services organisations have been unable to lend because their platform was down. Given the wide range of uses you should consider which areas of your organisation use the platform, and would be most affected if it were unavailable. Does analytics allow you to
Once you know the impact that analytics has had on these different areas you might find that actually the software is more important than you initially thought, or it might give you some idea of other areas of the business that might find the software useful. Either way, it is an important piece of information that might provide an insight into additional areas to consider when evaluating your ROI.
At Katalyze Data, we believe all of these tips are fundamental to success – it’s about the people, the process and the technology. Want to know more? Please reach out to the Katalyze Data team for a free, no obligation consultation on how our platform health check services can accelerate your business.