Synchrotech Group

Challenge

Following IBM’s CEO Samuel Palmisano assertion: “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it”, it's no wonder many CEOs are gun shy on claims that technology investment will help us improve performance - do you remember Y2K, eCommerce and even CRM? Clearly many technology solutions have been oversold in their ability to drive effective ROI.

Enterprise needs in terms of BI and IS in general appear to be manifest and necessary, since they are commonly suspected to increase organizational efficiency, quality and transparency. However, current statistics show that these investments are not always reflected in terms of increased productivity and benefits in the companies’ accounting statements, particularly in those of small and midsize enterprises (SME). This paradoxical situation can be best illustrated with the example of Swiss enterprises: For several successive years, Switzerland was ranked at the top of international ICT-expenditure statistics. According to the European Information Technology Observatory, Switzerland presents an expenditure average per capita of 2673 Euros in 2004, followed by Sweden with 2374 Euros, the USA (1966) and the UK (1908); with 1565 Euros, Ireland is almost in the Western European average of 1521 Euros. Nevertheless, as shown in a recent study of the OECD, these important IT-investments do oftentimes not result in increased productivity for Swiss enterprises. This study analyzes the contribution of ICTs on labor productivity growth in 14 European countries and the US from 1996-2002. The results of this study show that Ireland and the USA recorded the most important contribution of the ICTs to labor productivity growth in that period (1.9 percentage points in both countries), followed by Finland (1.40), Sweden (1.33) and the UK (1.21). In Switzerland, the contribution of the ICTs to labor productivity growth is only of 0.43 percentage points, ranking it in 11th position out of the 15 analyzed countries.

Synchrotech Group offers a vendor-neutral approach to determining the most appropriate technology, quantifying the value-added generated that one might reasonably expect to obtain and creating an implementation blueprint addressing people, process and technology to ensure this return is obtained.