Three Technologists Talk About Justifying ROI

"Business cases are a good start, but we try to keep it very simple," he says. "Any strategy we look to invest in, we go back to basics. Will this make us money? Will we get in trouble with the regulators? Then we ask if somebody else in the industry is much better at this. Should we even bother, given the length of the strategy and the money spent, doing it in-house? You get caught up in doing everything yourself when there are companies outside the bank that can do this better."

In the case of changing a trading platform, don't even worry about ROI goals in the first year, says Allan Dorrington, head of trading credit technology at RBC. Something that big is a multi-year investment, and short-term goals are near-irrelevant. The important thing is to collaborate with the appropriate business unit when fomenting the strategy. Their support will make it easier to survive that first year. If a new platform can aid multiple business units, across the middle and back office as well, all the better.

Making the case for ROI is easier when an organization has IT literacy from top to bottom, says Darryl Gunness, VP at Bank of America Merrill Lynch. Management needs to understand the intended impact and the potential of the technology. "We don't need to have developers at every level of the organization, but at every level you should have enough education to know that, from a governance perspective, I'm exposing myself in a certain way by using a new piece of technology vs a tried-and-true technology," he says. "When you're delivering the value for any project, you have to have a clear strategy, clean data, the right skillset, and, more important than ever, job processes to respond to changes in environment."