Conclusion 04: Results

Intranets delivered the best ROI, while e-commerce and outsourcing disappointed most often. But across the board, IT executives with confidence in their ROI metrics reported less difficulty in determining ROI on different kinds of IT spending, even IT infrastructure, a notoriously tricky one.

Intranets met or exceeded the ROI expectations of 80% of respondents, followed by security, at 75%. The greatest disappointments were e-commerce, which fell below the ROI expectations of 33% of respondents, and outsourcing, at 32%. However, especially in technology investment arenas such as ERP, outsourcing and intranets, more confident execs more frequently reported favorable results than respondents with doubts about their ROI methods.

Confident execs regularly found it easier to assess the ROI of various initiatives than those that lack confidence. For example, 63% of more confident execs found infrastructure somewhat or very easy to calculate ROI for, versus 40% for those less confident. However, comparisons of other initiatives such as customer relationship management and security were less dramatic.

When asked to rate IT initiatives on the ease or difficulty of determining ROI and business value, the easiest were desktop systems (2.9 on a scale of 1 to 4), outsourcing (2.9) and e-commerce (2.7). The most difficult were knowledge management (2.0), CRM (2.2) and security (2.4).