Showing How It's Done — The ROI Awards
June 22, 2016
Success stories are perhaps the most informative resource for understanding how to maximize value from technology. Learning from the best practices of peers is almost always more helpful than a user manual, list of product features and promises from the sales team.
We understood this early on at Nucleus Research and built our industry analyst business on proven, case-based customer success. We’ve published more Return on Investment (ROI) case studies than any other firm. And we continue to base our research on how end-user customers are actually leveraging technology for business benefit versus merely what ‘cool’ new technologies are being offered.
And for the past 13 years, we’ve recognized the very best tech implementations with our annual ROI Awards. These are the top ten deployments that achieve the highest ROI each year. The beauty of the awards — and ROI in general — is that it’s all fact-based. No panel of judges debating which implementation is more worthy of an award. The cold, hard ROI numbers determine without question who wins.
In fact, the awards underscore the value of ROI in assessing success. It’s a straightforward equation that delivers a clear and objective number. Conclusive evidence of how a technology performed. ROI is basically the forensics of technology and the numbers don’t lie.
That’s what makes the ROI Awards so compelling. There’s no guesswork, no lobbying and no tough call. At a higher level, the ROI Awards identify industry trends by showing which technologies are delivering the highest return. For example in 2002 when we launched the awards, the average ROI among the winners was 399 percent. Last year that was up to 858 percent and this year it exceeds 1,000 percent.
This industry increase is in part due to customers getting more strategic in how they implement technology. More importantly, smart vendors are increasingly aligning solutions that deliver better ROI.
I’ve seen the conversation shift over the past 15 years from how cool features and widgets work to how customers can overcome challenges and meet business goals. It’s transforming the industry and has allowed technologies such as the cloud, mobile and analytics to emerge and thrive.
The shift from product feature focus to customer success is delivering greater value and accelerating returns. No one exemplifies that more than the winners of the ROI Awards. I invite you to take a closer look at the winners and even read the case studies we developed for them. They are instructive and inspiring, showing how businesses today can maximize their investments and get the most value.
Case studies can be found at Nucleus Research