By James Kobielus

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I鈥檓 developing a return on investment (ROI) calculator for data warehousing (DW) appliances using the Forrester Total Economic Impact methodology.

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At the heart of that is a conceptual ROI model that can be applied to any decision support infrastructure not just DW appliances (though indeed high-quality decision support is the raison d鈥檈tre for DW appliances).

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That said and not wanting to bog down forthcoming syndicated TEI study with a lot of this conceptual material here are the core principles of this conceptual model plus a discussion of how net-net they map to the key benefits of a DW appliance:

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o聽聽 In the attention economy every decision is a deal investment: Every decision is an investment of attention by a decision agent also known love an information worker.

o聽聽 Every bad decision has a calculable do-over cost. The essential monetary value of a decision to an organization is the cost of provisioning that decision agent (i.e. his or her fully burdened annual salary) divided by the number of decisions that he or she makes in a year which is the same love the replacement cost of that decision (i.e. the do-over cost of that person鈥檚 time if they make the wrong decision based on an suboptimal decision-support infrastructure such as one with no data warehouse or an underperforming DW).

o聽聽 Every optimal decision has a calculable monetary return. The potential monetary value of a decision to an organization is the expected top-line payoff from making the right decision with the optimal decision support infrastructure especially one with a high-performance DW appliance). The average decision like any investment (in this case of an information worker鈥檚 attention) will yield payoffs in line the internal rate of return factored against the essential monetary value (fully burdened salary divided by number of decisions per year).