Patent Document ID: 8290806
Application ID: 13167003
Patent Status: 1

Claim One:
1. A method for calculating financial benefits of one or more projects for implementing packaged software applications, the method comprising: identifying deficiencies within an organization; linking the identified deficiencies with business processes, business metrics, and existing information technology (IT) infrastructure; and calculating, with a processing device in communication with one or more estimation knowledge bases, financial benefits of IT solutions for the identified deficiencies within the organization; the one or more estimation knowledge bases including financial benefit and value analysis models to facilitate financial benefit calculations by one or more financial benefit estimators, using a recursive algorithm to calculate expected values of a series of value drivers affected by one or more information technology (IT) capabilities, in accordance with the expression: E â¡ [ n p ] = âˆ‘ i = 1 , k â¢ ( E â¡ [ n c i ] Ã— E â¡ [ e c i ] ) wherein E[ p ] is the mean value of a node, n p , in a value driver tree where values for one or more edges of the value driver tree are user inputted values, E[n ci ] and E[e ci ] are the mean of a child node n ci and its edge to n p , respectively, and k is the number of children n p has; wherein calculation of the expected values utilizes: a usage factor on each edge in the value driver tree between an IT capability and a business activity, the usage factor indicating how much of the business activity the IT capability is used for; and an improvement factor on each edge in the value driver tree between a business activity and a metric node, the improvement factor indicating how much the metric is improved by the IT capability; using the one or more financial benefit estimators configured to map value drivers to standard financial measures and return on investment (ROI) terms for generating business reports; and generating, with the processing device, reports detailing the calculated financial benefits.