A report by Forrester outlines the financial impacts to an organization that adopts SharePoint. The report models the costs, benefits to the organization as a whole, flexibility, and risk. Keep in mind that this report was commissioned by Microsoft and if the result wasn’t favorable it would have probably not seen the light of day but it turns out SharePoint is a good thing according to Forrester. The following excerpt is from the article but you can download the entire article as a PDF here.
The data collected in this study indicate that standardizing and centralizing on a platform based on SharePoint Server 2010 has the potential to provide a solid return on the investment. The risk-adjusted ROI of 108%, along with a rapid payback period (breakeven point) raises confidence that the investment is likely to succeed, as the risks and uncertainty that may threaten the project have been considered and quantified.
Forrester’s interviews with Microsoft customers yielded valuable observations. Forrester found that organizations can realize benefits in the form of:
- Employing the expanded capabilities of SharePoint 2010 to supplant standalone software programs for document and records management, databases, custom applications, older Web 2.0 tools, and development tools.
- Shifting development and administration of collaboration efforts from IT to business units and freeing IT resources for new projects and strategic priorities.
- Infusing SharePoint interfaces with data from line-of-business applications and legacy data stores, ultimately aggregated in dashboards and scorecards.
- More and better portals for more stakeholders (customers, suppliers, partners, etc.) by capitalizing on SharePoint enablement of faster, cheaper development and hosting.
- Building libraries of enterprise Web services and parts for rapid reuse without the need for IT involvement.
- Creating a more compelling path to expanded presence, messaging, and unified communications.
- Business risk reduction due to management of heretofore unstructured content assets, placing information in better managed repositories, and reducing risk of compliance violations and hidden exposures.
Based on these findings, companies looking to implement SharePoint Server 2010 can anticipate significant cost savings and efficiency gains.
