Return on Investment (ROI) and Benefits

Today's economic climate has forced the control of information technology (IT) investments into becoming a necessary and vital part of business behaviour. IT managers are no longer able to approve large expenditure without a strong commercial business case showing a high return on investment (ROI). Another factor driving a commercial focus amongst IT managers are statistics that show that a very high percentage of IT projects fail to deliver a ROI over an acceptable time frame.

The business environment is now dominated by prudent investment decisions and recessionary attitudes. Central control of IT spending has re-surfaced and is the responsibility of business leadership and procurement officers now feature in the sales cycle. Therefore IT departments must deliver value and discuss ROI to:

Support the business case by quantifying business benefits
Focus the project on areas with highest ROI
Help to budget more precisely (know the costs upfront)
Manage technology investments to maximize profitability
Rationalise further investments
Be able to prove success by measuring against quantifiable ROI

IT projects that show low risk and high rewards are the ones that get careful consideration and approval.

Autonomy is unique in being able to offer a business efficiency tool that delivers tangible benefits of business process automation for unstructured (MS Office documents, emails, web pages, etc) semi-structured (Document & Content Management data stores, XML, etc) and structured information (databases).

According to Gartner Group, "Today, 80% of business is conducted on unstructured information" and "Unstructured data doubles every three months". For example, information on sales, customers, competitors, products, suppliers and people.

How efficiently and effectively this information is managed has a direct impact on a company's bottom line. This is where Autonomy's unique ability to understand information AND automate processes around this information comes into play.

This ability to automate processes around unstructured information has a significant ROI, based on Autonomy's ability to reduce costs associated with manual processes, as well as a large and wide spread impact across a corporation, its customers and suppliers.

Furthermore, this sophisticated technology is modularised and can be customised to increase the ROI from other applications for example: e-business, e-commerce, eCRM, ERP, call-centers, EIP, KM, online publishing, etc.

In the current economic recession Autonomy's ROI of automation is key because companies simply cannot afford to ignore investing in ways to reduce costs and increase productivity and revenue. Companies can no longer hire more staff to manage the accumulating masses of unstructured business critical information.

Autonomy Benefits

Operational Improvements & Increasing Corporate Agility

Minimize Labour/Operation Costs & Increase Productivity:

Deliver Timely Relevant Content
Leverage Expertise
Reduce time-to-market of e-business solutions
Empower Employee Self Service
Better Sales Execution
Aggregate Corporate Services

Leverage Existing Investments:

Boost Investment and Functionality of Other Applications

Minimize Labour Costs - Employees no longer required to manually classify, tag, hyperlink and organise unstructured content.
Increase Productivity - Less time wasted searching for information through accurate searches based on concepts, targeted information through alerting, profiling and categorization helps employees share best practices throughout their organisation.
Deliver Timely Content - Employees can be automatically alerted e.g. by email or SMS, to relevant new content based on their profiles. They can also be automatically linked to similar content as they are writing an email or document, or directed to other employees whose expertise and topic interests are similar to their own. This elimintates the need to stop working to send for information.
Leverage Existing Content - Large archives of content can now be automatically categorised and indexed and used, leveraging corporate knowledge.
Leverage Expertise - Employee's profiles can be automatically matched and connected for collaboration creating centers of expertise.
Reduce TTM - Build a portal in a matter of weeks not months or years
Boost Investment and Functionality of Other Applications - Use Autonomy components to enable other applications such as eCRM, B2B and portals to process receive and organize unstructured content in ANY format.
Empower Employee Self Service - Employees can now find information on their own, self train, administer their own corporate services, lowering support costs and information distribution costs, e.g. corporate communications
Better Sales Execution - provide your employees with all the relevant information (customers, products, markets) and tools to cross-sell and up-sell.
Retain Investment in People - User-trained agents can be passed onto a replacement employee when someone leaves. This allows new employees to get up to speed faster.

Increase Revenue & Increase Competitive Agility

Build Customer Loyalty and Attract New Ones:

Personalise
Improve Customer Service
Enable Customers to Share Ideas

Maximize Cross-selling, Up-selling Opportunities:

Profiling
Deliver Timely Targeted Content
Deliver what the customer wants to buy

Competitive Advantage:

Launch new solutions keeping ahead of market competitives

Build Customer Loyalty and Attract New Ones:

Personalise visits to Internet, e-commerce web sites by profiling (likes/dislikes) then tailor the content they see, thereby building customer interest and loyalty - turn one-time visitors into regular users.
Improve Customer Service - Emails sent to call centers can be automatically answered or routed e.g. based on natural language, "How do I...?" Have this facility available on-line 24x7.
Enable Customers to Share Ideas - Automatic community profiling of clients provides ideas & opportunities for targeting information on products and services.

Maximize Cross-selling, Up-selling Opportunities:

Profiling can also be used to focus advertising on an individual basis yielding a higher return on advertising and marketing spending.
Deliver Timely Content - Visitors can be automatically alerted e.g. by email or SMS, to relevant new content based on their profiles.
Deliver what the customer wants to buy - Enable customers to create their own agents, e.g. "I'm interested in Buy-to-rent Mortgages"

Click here to see benefits in a Client Relationship Management (CRM) Environment

Autonomy's ROI

Reduced labor expenses
Increased read-across (one piece of information can have multiple uses)
Integrated productivity
On the job learning
Collaboration
Parity of information
Innovation
Shared expertise
Avoid duplication of effort and time wasted
Reduce production and running costs
Leverage content
Differentiation from competing websites
Turn one-time visitors into regular users