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The Business Case: Page 7 of 10

One senior manager recounted a story in which his BlackBerry device saved the day while he was on the road in Asia and unable to use his cell phone. He received an urgent e-mail from an important client in Russia and was able to quickly resolve a crisis.

"Without the BlackBerry, we would have disappointed the client. Instead, we gained business," Marshall says. Not long after the episode, the client re-upped for a year.

Marshall has used the same approach to persuade his bosses to invest in a KM (knowledge management) project. Even Lotus, the KM vendor, tried but couldn't quantify the returns Burson was realizing, so Marshall depends on anecdotes. Stories always emerge about how the KM system helps Burson's 1,600 employees in 77 offices service clients like one, cooperative unit.

Indeed, analysts say ROI doesn't work all the time. It's good for industrial businesses but doesn't apply well to knowledge-based industries, says Gartner analyst Roger Fulton. For those businesses, customer loyalty is a priority, but it's almost impossible to tie IT investments to fostering that loyalty and then place a value on that loyalty, he says.

Even when ROI analysis is the way to go, be careful about trusting vendor-supplied calculations. "There's no such thing as average ROI," says Rebecca Wetteman, an analyst at Nucleus Research. She uses the example of Microsoft's BizTalk Server. A shop that already has a heavy investment in Microsoft technology will see much higher ROI than one that doesn't. One size doesn't fit all.