Latest ROI Press

How to talk to your CEO about technology

Getting the board to approve IT projects requires not only good presentation skills but also the ability to speak the same language as the rest of the business, says Andrew Donoghue.

While it's debatable whether IT leaders are actually any less articulate than senior managers from other areas of the business, the idea that technical staff lack communication skills is certainly a persistent one.

One of the issues may be that IT concepts are fundamentally complex and as a result are more difficult to explain.

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ROI wins the day when it comes to identifying the value in predicting customer demand and reducing wastage for supermarket...

Waitrose is rolling out a forecasting system to help it better predict demand for goods from customers.

The retailer - which has 184 stores that carry up to 25,000 different product lines each - decided it had to improve its forecasting system and carried out pilot projects the previous year.

Waitrose's product systems manager, Mathew Hallett, explained predicting what shoppers want is a tricky business because retailers have to 'know what the customer wants to buy, days before they buy - even though most often when they walk into the shop they don't know what it is'.

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Value in the public sector is a clear winner for fraud busters... ROI points the way to best solution...

The National Health Service fraud-busting unit has embarked on one of its biggest IT projects ever as part of its continued crackdown on the millions of pounds lost through fraud in the health service each year.

The NHS Counter Fraud Service (CFS) will use software from SAS for predictive data analysis which can indicate where fraud is most likely to occur and detect previously hidden trends in the data.

Using the same techniques banks use to spot fraudulent activity on credit cards, the software will also be able to analyse payments across the NHS and raise alerts for unusual activity, which can then be investigated by NHS counter-fraud specialists.

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Only a matter of time before the spreadsheets hit the fan

The danger in proliferating spreadsheets was highlighted dramatically in a recent article in the London Daily Telegraph. In the wake of Sarbanes-Oxley, management is keen to reduce risk but is still relying on spreadsheets which are largely untested. The consequences of small errors could be catastrophic. For example, $884 Billion is traded daily on the London International Futures Exchange - a 1% error is worth nearly $9Billion! The article cites the case of the collapse of the Long Term Capital Management (LTCM) hedge fund which was worth $5Billion. It had borrowed $125Billion on the basis of flawed spreadsheet projections and the failure caused shockwaves which spread throughout the worldwide money markets.

Microscope - Return on Investment

Microscope magazine article on Return on Investment

Using Business Cases to Justify Technology Spend

What constitutes a good business decision and how can these be determined from an economic perspective?

Pat on the Bottom - Marc Beishon, Sales Force Magazine

Sales Force Magazine article about Shark Finesse and its Shark ROI Software tool.

The Shark ROI Sales Tool - finalist for Innovation in Sales award!

Shark Finesse has beaten many other entrants to gain a place in the final for Innovation in Sales at the prestigious National Sales Awards. Now in its eighth year, The National Sales Awards began in order to acknowledge excellence in sales.

John Cruickshank Interview - Sales Force Magazine

In this article, John Cruickshank speaks of his time at Equant and his role as one of the company's pivotal sales directors. John Cruickshank comments on how Shark has changed the way his sales force works.

It all comes down to ROI - Huthwaite Article

The article is about the Shark software and was written and published on Huthwaite's website.

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