Research Portal ROI Considerations

• Value of time saved. One of our clients hired market research firm Forrester to assess the impact of its SinglePoint portal on productivity. Forrester determined that each user session on SinglePoint saved 1.5 hours of professional time. The time savings accrued from having superior search results, being able to search multiple market research analyst firms’ content at once, having primary research available with secondary research in one location. Using $100 per hour of professional time, it is very straightforward to calculate the value of this time saving based on the number of annual market research portal user sessions a client experiences. The suggested metric is:

• Consolidated purchasing of information. Duplicated and underutilized information contracts are the norm in many large organizations. SinglePoint makes consolidated licensing and enterprise-wide sharing of purchased content a practical goal. One client has estimated that its SinglePoint portal saves them $1.25 million per year in avoiding duplicate research purchases in their operations around the world. There were 25 syndicated sources that were in their portal at the time this study was done.

• Primary research savings. Primary market research projects are, by nature, expensive undertakings. Often, the research has already been performed but the reports are neither widely known nor findable since they are scattered on network folders and laptops or held in repositories like Microsoft SharePoint with ineffective search technology. SinglePoint can consolidate primary research into a single repository and make it available to authorized users throughout the organization. This can eliminate the need for duplicate primary research, saving substantial amounts of money and increasing the impact of primary research that has been performed. One Northern Light client has estimated that its SinglePoint portal saves the client 10% in its annual primary research budget in avoided new research projects. (For this client, this amounts to $1.0 million dollars per month in savings!) A “search SinglePoint first” culture backed up by a requirement that new research proposals include as a first-section discussion of the literature search in SinglePoint helps achieve this ROI benefit.

• Reduced number of websites/portals. It is not uncommon for departments and functional groups within an organization to provision and field numerous websites, each facing a different audience such as Sales, Marketing, and Product Management in multiple organizations and geographies. One client greatly reduced the cost of providing research internally when their SinglePoint implementation permitted the consolidation of 150 distinct intranet sites hosting or accessing research in all their divisions around the world down into just one site. On the IT side alone, they estimated that they saved $1.5 million per year in hardware, software, and, especially, IT systems administration. This can be converted into a metric of $10,000 per duplicate portal eliminated per year.
  

• Supporting large numbers of users with limited staff. In this era of budget cuts and staff reductions, a self-service market research portal makes it feasible to support a wide audience of consumers of research with a very limited internal staff. For example, one of our clients has one person supporting 5,000 users of secondary research via a SinglePoint portal. Another client has five people supporting over 60,000 users of secondary research using SinglePoint. In these examples, without the SinglePoint portal significantly more staff would be required to help the users of research find the research that had been purchased or created for them. Also, without the SinglePoint portal, the market research staff would be overwhelmed with volumes of requests for help finding reports.
  

• Obtaining new business. Each organization has a good idea of what value a closed sale might bring to the table or what being able to rapidly respond to a competitive situation means to a company. Most of Northern Light’s clients use SinglePoint portals to help prepare for sales presentations, customer briefings, and to find persuasive analyst support for their product roadmaps to make them more compelling to potential customers. Such considerations are especially important to clients pursuing business aggressively around the world. One requested success story from its sales and marketing staff to document the contribution of SinglePoint to business and customer wins, and so many poured in that they had to stop collecting the success stories because the market research staff did not have time to read them all! The staff estimated that $30 million in sales wins were identified that were materially assisted by the SinglePoint portal by helping the sales team prepare better.

• Intellectual property issues and fair use. It is easy for users to unknowingly violate the usage terms of their agreements with sources of secondary research — an exposure that no large company wants. This happens when users post documents to multiple internal portals without any system for enforcing licensing arrangements. Market research analyst firms have been known to present invoices for hundreds of thousands of dollars to companies when market research reports were posted to websites sites without proper access controls. Northern Light SinglePoint enforces the terms of the content licensed and frees organizations from day-to-day concern with such usage issues.  $450,000 for a single report

• Developing new products faster. A strategic research portal can speed the time to insight in product research. By making all research easily available researchers can spend less time looking for information and more time considering it. A product researcher using a research portal incorporating reports with external expert commentary (e.g., Gartner, Forrester, IDC in the information technology industry) will have a better grasp of what customers want and what competitors are planning. Text analytics, a Northern Light specialty, can help greatly with the process of product research. For example, all relationships between technologies or scientific concepts (e.g., drugs, diseases, genes) can be automatically identified to the researcher. A senior researcher at a global research-driven pharmaceutical company made this comment when he noticed a key relationship for the first time while looking at a text analytics result in a SinglePoint portal: “This is an ’aha moment’!”

• Improved decision making. Without a simple-to-access research portal, the fact is that most users give up and stop looking for the best information that bears on their projects and just make do with whatever they can find. With SinglePoint, users have the best information available on every search easily and quickly, and even more important than the time they save is that their business analyses are well-informed. What is the value of having better researched and analyzed business decisions? It could easily dwarf all the millions of dollars of savings combined from all the other ROI considerations.

We have one excellent example of this factor. One of our clients reported that their SinglePoint portal saved the company $100 million on one decision when an acquisition team working on a time-pressured deal over a weekend found research in their SinglePoint portal that challenged the market forecast for the technology of the acquisition target. Without SinglePoint, the client thought the deal would have gone through and would have been a disaster. By impacting this one decision alone, the SinglePoint portal paid for itself for the next 750 years!