How to maximise ROI from technology platforms

How much do you spend on licencing various applications in the cloud? What about overlapping products?

Microsoft Teams and Zoom for example? What about Atlassian or ServiceNow licences? Do you really need them both?

Do you use all the functionality you could in your existing products? Chances are, you don’t (I bet you don’t.)

Industry research shows that established companies or those who have made a number of acquisitions inevitably have overlap and waste in their technology platforms.

Here are some key points to focus on to help maximise ROI, and ensure you’re getting the most from your investment.

1. Reconciliation of licences

When was the last time you did an audit and reviewed your purchased licences versus how many are actually in use?

Have you analysed your biggest spend items and worked your way through them, checking they are all appropriate?

For example: Could you use an E3 rather than an E5 Microsoft 365 licence, have you evaluated the difference?

With staff joining and leaving constantly it’s good to have annual licence reviews as it’s quite easy to overcount licences.

If you haven’t done one in the last few years it might be a good idea to do one now. You might be surprised by the cost savings you could make.

2. Know your products

Products are often purchased with a specific function in mind. However over time, people change, and so do processes resulting in orphan applications and products which are no longer needed.

It’s quite common for IT teams to assume that applications are still in use, so it’s quite likely if you have a big application estate that you could decommission some with no impact to you or your users.

Alternatively, you may have processes or requirements which your business colleagues may think they need a new product to fill the gap through lack of knowledge of existing functionality in existing products. One of the benefits of cloud applications is typically they are constantly evolving.

So do you have subject matter experts or business analysts who focus on keeping up to date with specific departments requirements and liaising with others to check a solution doesn’t already exist?

For example: Do you need a full Tableau environment when you have Power BI and QlikView already in use?

3. Understand your minimum requirements

When evaluating products it’s important to know the minimum requirements which will meet the brief, as well as the feature requirements which will bring the most benefit to your organisation.

Then bringing cost into the mix may mean that you choose a product that fills the minimum without needing to purchase a better product which does so much more.

There is a time and place for the best of breed products, however often a small process change or alternative solution might result in a short term fix. After evaluation, this might end up being a long term solution with no further expenditure required.

4. Assign product owners

During an applications life cycle at a particular organisation, it may become staid, and overlooked due to being seen as a legacy application.

New features can excite people to renew interest in the application, resulting in improved ROI and use.

It’s always a good idea to assign a product owner to keep track and stay up to date on new features.

Keeping in touch with account managers who may suggest related applications that may be of use to you.

5. Make training available to everyone

It is essential to provide comprehensive training in a variety of forms to get the most out of your applications.

People like to learn in different ways so to get the most out of applications and support those using them you need to provide appropriate methods and materials to help equip them with the knowledge. From self-paced tutorials to online webinars, to pdf’s and hand’s on sandbox environments, having these available and known to people is essential.

Having an excellent Learning and Development portal is great but people need to know it exists and how to use it for it to be useful.

6. Create champion networks

Having an awesome IT department is fantastic but what makes an organisation and its systems hum are a network of colleagues who are advocates in their teams for particular products and are known as subject matter experts in them. They are the people who are passionate about a particular product, see it’s benefits and know how it can help their team do better.

Giving them the support they need to help their team means they do a better job, their colleagues do, and the business progresses as it’s being led by the business rather than IT.

7. Use your application use statistics

Applications now typically surface internal use, access and other information to other applications so they can be analysed for security, use and other reasons.

By having this information, you can get a better understanding of who should be using applications, who shouldn’t be, and how best to use them.

Never discount the analytics that can be gained by looking at this as it can drive entire new ways of working.

For example: you might find information viewed in Salesforce via an expensive user licence could be surfaced to a website removing the need for that person to have a full Salesforce licence.

8. Ensure you can integrate applications, smoothing work for everyone

Being able to integrate two applications is one easy way to improve ROI.

In the era of RPA it is crucial that you not only have skills to do this in your teams but that your applications have the ability to integrate and share information between each other easily.

For example: One of the best ways I’ve seen recently is how Power Automate allows a business user to quickly create a flow, which takes a message in Microsoft Teams and creates a task in a Planner board.

9. Focus on good vendor relationships

An often overlooked way to ensure you get the most out of your technology platforms is having a good relationship with your vendor account manager.

For example: While it may take up time keeping in contact, it can easily reap rewards as they will try to optimise your use of their products by providing value to you.

All very useful for making your job easier and improving your ROI.

10. Help your leaders drive adoption, where they go others will follow

Last but not least, it is crucial that the leadership team is on-board with getting the most out of applications and are willing to support and drive changes which may be required to allow this to happen.

This may be a simple message in a Town Hall praising a business user for introducing a change, or a message on a Yammer forum to highlight how they use a particular application to work better.

Having this sort of message come from the top will drive adoption and ROI in a particular product like no other.

You may have noticed something about these points, the vast majority are focused on people. Making them aware, knowledgeable and skilled in your products is what will easily bring you the biggest ROI increase, so be sure to pay particular attention to these areas.

Hopefully, some of those will strike a nerve and trigger you to action, saving you time and hopefully money at the same time.

If you need help reviewing any of these feel free to get in touch.