Service Oriented Architecture Field Guide for Executives

7.6. CASE STUDY: CALCULATING SOA ROI

Taking a look at our Return Handling and Expense Approval case studies outlined earlier, we can better understand how SOA ROI calculations operate within a real-world context. Up to this point, we do not have sufficient information from either case study to actually make an ROI calculation. As such, we will introduce additional details with each respective case study.

SOA ROI for the Return Handling Case Study

For our mail-order company, we will examine SOA ROI from a tactical perspective. After conducting a feasibility study, our project team was able to identify the following data points that are relevant to tactical ROI:

• IT spends $143,000 per year in middleware license maintenance fees, $68,000 of which is used to connect the various systems that currently support handling of customer returns. Initial proof-of-concept work indicates that this $68,000 annual expense can be avoided by using standard service interfaces.

Figure 7.3. Tactical ROI calculation for the Return Handling case

• Based on industry data, the SOA pilot project deployed last year, and initial estimates by the project management team, it is believed that integrating these systems via standard, service-based interfaces and messaging protocols will yield a reduction in time spent maintaining the system by 15 hours per month.

• The cost of system maintenance resources is $72 per ...