Do ROI Calculators Produce Real ROI?

(Excerpt from original post on the Taneja Group News Blog)

As both a vendor product marketer and now an analyst, I’ve often been asked to help produce an “official” ROI (or the full TCO) calculator for some product. I used to love pulling out Excel and chaining together pages of cascading formulas.  But I’m getting older and wiser.  Now I see that ROI calculators are by and large just big rat holes. In fact I was asked again this week and, instead of quickly replying “yes, if you have enough money” and spinning out some rehashed spreadsheet (like some other IT analyst firms), I spent some time thinking about why the time and money spent producing detailed ROI calculators is usually a wasted investment, if not a wasted opportunity (to do better).

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