Digimind will unveil its method for calculating the Return On Investment from a Competitive Intelligence system on September 30, at the 1st ICC convention

DIGIMIND, n°1 French provider of competitive intelligence software solutions, will unveil its method for calculating the ROI from Competitive Intelligence systems at the 1st "Innovation, Competition & Knowledge" convention, held on September 30 .

The 1st ROI assessment method for Competitive Intelligence systems

As opposed to other types of software such as ERPs, to-date there has not yet been a thorough reflection on how to address the profitability of intelligence systems dedicated exclusively to Competitive and Economic Intelligence.

Yet the ROI is a key performance indicator, useful for convincing colleagues and managers within your company, and essential for steering a CI project and assessing its success. The issue was certainly at the heart of the concerns of many DIGIMIND customers: large European industrial corporations.

Digimind's natural response was to design a ready-to-use assessment method to calculate the return on investment from CI systems, drawing on its 7 years of experience of CI projects in partnership with these major corporations.

The 3 stages of the "ROI rocket"

The method takes stock of the three main areas considered as the basis for productivity gains calculations :

• Immediate improvements in day-to-day productivity for repetitive data-handling tasks (scanning, data collection, analysis, distribution …);
• Opportunity cost of a more detailed and more extensive surveillance of the environment (expanding from ten to fifty themes being monitored, keeping the same team and without encuring any significant extra cost);
• Benefits from "networking" intelligence based on Metcalfe's law and the reduction in transactional costs.

Productivity gains of over 1000% for "group-wide" projects

A clear conclusion from our work is that there is a strong link between the number of people involved in the CI system and the level of increase in the ROI.

Consequently, for a CI project involving a team of 4 to 5 people and a target community of 50 people, it is possible to obtain benefits in the order of 400% to 500% of the initial agreed investment, effective right from the end of the project's first year.

For CI projects deployed throughout entire corporations, involving between 500 and 1000 users, the ROI can quickly attain levels above 1000%, after two or three years of project development .