Remember the 1980s? I'm embarrassed to say that I enjoyed Telstar's Pong tennis game like everybody else. But the decade was more than just 10 years of unfortunate recreational choices; it was a period of unfettered growth for the IT sector. Spurred on by falling prices, rising processor speeds and a proliferation of accessible productivity software like Word and Excel, businesses invested huge sums almost blindly in their IT departments.

By the 1990s, however, that blank check had been cashed and businesses began to see IT as a cost center that needed to prove itself. Today, the strategic question is this: How can we use IT information to drive the top line? Real-time business analytics offer the answer, and the key to driving these investments and benefits is better return on investment (ROI) modeling.

The first challenge is to get everyone in the organization to agree to an ROI model. The bigger challenge, however, lies in persuading the group to enforce and execute it. The fly in the ointment is—and always will be—convincing people to concur on the direct cause-and-effect relationship and encouraging the front-line business unit operative to actually subscribe to and accept higher quotas or higher sales objectives because of an IT investment.

When you're making an investment that promises to improve productivity, it's easy for everybody to sit back and say, "Yes, I can see the value in this because I'll require less infrastructure and fewer people in the back office. I can tie higher productivity and a lower head count to more success and, therefore, I can justify the investment." But that phase of productivity-based IT investment is over. The new conversation is all about how to use information strategically as a competitive advantage—how to use it to drive that top line.

Most IT organizations, unfortunately, are struggling with how to lead and be successful in that dialogue. The keys to success, therefore, are two-fold. First, as I stated earlier, you need to agree to an ROI modeling foundation. Second, you need the executive vision and insight to bring together business and IT leaders to agree on a strategic approach for measuring growth objectives against the cost of enhanced information and decision making.

How does Teradata help your company reach these goals? We have world-class analytics as well as industry and professional services consultants who have built out models and methodologies that we can share with our customers. We also have business impact models that show specific case studies and examples of the benefit of extended analytics and how their deployment can impact both the top and bottom lines of successful companies.

For businesses to succeed today, they'll have to make a commitment at the executive level to use information as a competitive advantage and to impact business processes and decisions in real time based on the information provided by enhanced analytics. At Teradata, we have the ROI model, consulting services, methodology and content that you can use to measure the benefits of information-based decision making—just what your business needs to get ahead and stay there. T

Scott Gnau is vice president and general manager in research and development at Teradata.

� Teradata Magazine-September 2006