Information Technology Reference
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processes to lower the load of the call center, the amount of minutes saved by the
investment, and therefore ROI, is relatively easy to calculate, however, it has been
mentioned that is far more difficult to calculate revenue increases due the number of
people who would for instance “
switch their tariff plan based on the implementation of
certain new services
”.
Case 3 - Federal Ministry of the Interior
The department within the ministry is responsible for managing Austria's central resi-
dence registry and the foundation of Austrian's e-government services. The company
only uses open-source software; also the process engine is based on an open source
workflow system. The SOA implementation started in 2001 with XML and there were
no pilot projects in the beginning on its way to SOA. The main reasoning behind the
SOA implementation was to become faster, reduce errors, enable flexibility and im-
prove change management. As a result, the company managed to hold its costs at a
constant level, while traffic and number of users and transactions more than tripled. It
has been stated by the company that one of the major advantages gained by SOA is the
reuse of separate SOA blocks; accordingly all the processes of the company are cur-
rently supported by SOA. The decision to pursue a SOA strategy was primarily taken
on qualitative aspects as no calculations have been made prior to the investment. On-
going projects are evaluated with an static ROI calculation and investment costs are
simply compared to the costs saved. The company is satisfied with its investments in
SOA and during the past 4 years, the company managed to run at the same budget,
although the amount of traffic, users and transactions has more than tripled.
Case 4 - Publishing Company
The company is the leading publisher of newspapers and magazines in Austria. It
publishes 3 daily newspapers, 6 weekly magazines and employs more than 2000 em-
ployees in Austria. The company operates in a very heterogeneous IT environment,
therefore key challenges include the ability to build processes quicker, cost-efficiency
and the possibility to implement open-source technology more easily. In contrast to
the Telco case, the publishing business does not require very short time-to-market,
nevertheless SOA investment decisions have also taken by the IT department in order
to be better prepared for possible future developments.
Based on its strategic nature, initial SOA investments have not required any ROI
calculation at all. Main aspects proposed by the IT department to evaluate potential
investments have included cost and time savings in development, flexibility due to the
implementation of open-source technologies as well as support of future business-to-
business processes. In terms of continuous investments a 5-year ROI calculation is
required. The IT department is responsible for calculating the costs, while business
units are responsible for researching the benefits, either in cost savings or in revenue
increase dimensions and subsequently both parts are compared over a 5-year period.
No business project is approved if it doesn't break-even within the next 5 years,
though cost savings had been identified very quickly during the first process automa-
tion projects, e.g. to reduce the workload of the call-center or implementation of an
electronic billing system as the amount of minutes and postage expenses saved were
easy to calculate and quick-wins. The company has recently started its company-wide
SOA initiative and is satisfied with the results so far.
