Corporate managers need tools to help them make decisions regarding investments. Decisions about the costs of IT management may be of special concern, as the field of IT management may lie outside the immediate experience of those making the decisions, and yet IT may be essential to running the decision makers' businesses. Managing costs effectively often means investing only when a favorable return on an investment is evident and tangible. This may be problematic, since savings in general are intangible; thus, it is difficult for IT management to decide whether it makes sense or not to invest in a technology, process, tool, or solution.
There is a need to be able to answer questions such as: What will the savings be with this product or feature? What task or activity needs to be done better to increase savings? What process needs to improve?
Computer aided return-on-investment (ROI) sales tools that exist today, such as the methods and systems described in pending US patent application 20040010459, do not differentiate between tangible and intangible savings. This kind of solution, which includes efficient computing means, may provide vaguely intangible benefits and unrealistically large estimates of savings. Also, these tools cannot adapt to changes in business requirements, as surveys are transformed into datasets that cannot be changed. Finally, these solutions may not support practical business modeling actions that optimize the use of the investment.
The “IT Infrastructure Library” (ITIL) provides best practices in the area of service management. It contains specialist documentation on the planning, provisioning, and support of IT services. ITIL provides the basis for improvement of the use and effectiveness of an operationally deployed IT infrastructure. Consultancies can be provided to understand how a process can be improved with ITIL. Unfortunately, the result focuses on identifying which processes need to be improved and how, rather than identifying and quantifying the resulting savings.
Finally, other tools such as the Automation Assessment Tool of IBM Tivoli (Tivoli is a trademark of International Business Machines Corporation in certain countries) help provide an understanding of an organization's current automation capabilities and map key focus areas to enhance these capabilities. The tool measures the level of automation function against each of six functional areas within an IT environment and alerts management as to which processes need to be authorized, but does not provide information on savings.
There is thus a need for an easy to use and efficient computer aided tool for evaluating the tangible savings that can be expected from a business investment.