Costs and Benefits to Consider

Costs

Costs to consider include personnel, hardware, software, services (consultants, outsourcing) and training.

E-business: costs and return on investment — How much can you expect to pay for your e-business initiative? What will be your return on investment? Finding accurate answers to these questions is difficult, but this article can help.

Benefits

Benefits can be as direct as cost and/or personnel reduction, improved revenue and increased profits. Other benefits may be a challenge to measure, such as:

• better business intelligence,
• improved decision making, and
• improved strategic positioning.

e-Business can positively impact on many functional activities and business processes of firms. Some of these you perform regularly. Functional Business Activities and Processes Impacted by e-Business are provided here.

How do you measure e-business Return on Investment? It will depend on the nature and unique characteristics of your own business but here are e-Business ROI Metrics which could be used.

What are some of the potential benefits from adopting eBusiness technologies? Check our list of Typical Payoffs from e-Business Adoption.

Comment calculer le ROI d'un intranet? (in French only) — Calculating the ROI of an intranet is at best an inexact science. This article presents some possible approaches and discusses with examples how the direct and indirect benefits of an intranet can enter into ROI calculations.

Systèmes d'information des PME: 80% de ROI en moins de trois ans (in French only) — This article provides a more detailed look at the survey mentioned above. In particular, it describes the criteria used by SME senior managers to assess the ROI of their IT infrastructure.