The ROI index is a synthetic yet meaningful parameter used to express the benefit of making a project, as well as the benefit of making a certain choice related to a project, for example the technology to be used.
During my speech at the recent 360Flex Conference in Milan I presented the benefits achieved as a consequence of adopting Flex to re-design an enterprise application.
After an overview concerning the practical methods that can be used to evaluate the benefits and to calculate the Return On Investment (ROI), I presented a real-world case of an application for banking operations.
In that case, the benefit was measured in terms of the time saved to execute an ordinary operation (cashing a check) by using the Flex re-designed application respect the time that was formerly necessary to execute the same operation by using a "common" Oracle form-based application (simple html using the "traditional" logic of 1 click=1 page).
A tipically physical kind of measurement (time saved) was then translated into an economic parameter by valueing the time by the standard hourly wage of the staff involved in the operations of that kind.
The final passage was the calculation of the ROI formula.
The important and evident result was that the use of Flex contributed to leverage the ROI formula numerator (return) and to decrease its denominator (investment), for a double action of increment on the final result.
The slides of that speech can be found on SlideShare