Soft ROI, such as "increases employee productivity by 20%" does not have a direct connection to the bottom line. Hard ROI tells you just how that 20% productivity increase translates to a measurable economic return such as realized cost savings or revenue increase.

There are four basic flavors of value drivers to consider.

• Increased Revenues are sales directly attributable to the technology deployment. Such increases can be derived from increased sales leads, higher sales close rates, shortened sales cycles, higher repeat sales, increased billable hours, etc.

• Reduced/Avoided Costs are derived from savings associated with reduced outsourcing requirements and lower administrative costs that are the direct result of the application deployment. A caution: labor reductions that do not result in staff eliminations should not be counted, as the affected employees are simply redeployed within the organization. Some business costs can be eliminated all together. For example, costs such as elimination of staff, shipping, printing, transportation costs, and other components of the business workflow resulting from the mobile solution deployment.

• Decreased Risk/Liability are concrete costs that are avoided because the mobile solution keeps certain business situations from happening. For example, a mobile solution for facility managers that assesses building environment and health hazard compliance can help the enterprise reduce workforce liability and related legal action.

• Increased Business Opportunity calculates new revenue sources that are exclusively born out of the technology solution. For example, a mobile solution that captures and analyzes field data may reveal new strategic directions for the enterprise's products and services.

Total Investment is just another way of expressing TCO (Total Cost of Ownership). You already know this one! TCO is a vital ingredient to any rigorous ROI calculation. After all, you want to know what the economic benefits are AFTER you subtract off what you've sunk into the solution deployment.

Percent ROI is another way to express the financial return. When you see an ROI expressed as a percentage, this is simply the following ratio:

Warning: Do NOT assume that the ROI% is equal to the benefits divided by only initial costs. You should only assume this if there are no ongoing costs. Usually a technology purchase has associated ongoing costs that offset ongoing benefits, hopefully not to their exclusion.

Payback Period is an important metric since it computes the time period required, beginning at the time of investment in your offering, for you to recoup the invested dollars as a direct benefit of mobile solution deployment. It tells you how much time will go by from the time your company paid out the capital, to when you can recapture benefits that equal that investment amount -- or break even.