The age-old disconnect between IT and the business often comes down to three letters: ROI.
The teams can clash over what return on investment even means. For IT, a significant ROI for a digital solution may be reducing technical debt while enhancing uptime, scalability, and governance. But on the business side – and particularly for chief financial officers – the goals are understandably to cut costs, increase revenue, and boost productivity. The measurements and language are so different that often something gets lost in translation, leading to tension.
Alexander Wurm, a principal analyst with Nucleus Research, has a powerful way of describing this divide.
“There’s an inverse relationship between the complexity of technology and the simplicity of business ROI,” he said.
Because there’s such a different focus on value, Wurm added it’s crucial “to convert that technical value to a lens that a financial audience can relate to.” That’s why Nucleus Research prepares case studies, using a repeatable and validated methodology, to show how technical gains create financial value.
An example is a new case study that Wurm authored. It found that a regional bank saw a 97% ROI with a payback period of 9.9 months after deploying the Boomi Enterprise Platform to automate core operations, including loan processing, customer onboarding, and account maintenance.
Wurm took time to discuss the case study, explain how IT and the business can bridge their communication gap, and share why that’s an essential step toward leveraging advanced capabilities like AI and autonomous agents. We’ve edited the conversation for length and clarity.
Why is it essential for IT teams to consider how business leaders frame ROI?
Alexander Wurm: As you get into the weeds with technical differentiators of a platform, you may sometimes lose sight of the impact that’s important to the business side. As analysts at Nucleus Research, we try to distill the technology benefits. What are the differentiators that we hear when talking to an integration developer or another practitioner? Then, we translate that into the language of a CFO. We explain how this automation and workflow development eliminate manual work, resulting in time and cost savings. We show the relationship between technology enablement and business enablement. Sometimes, it can be hard for someone within the technical scope to unearth.
That leads us nicely to the value of Nucleus Research case studies. Can you explain the methodology for formulating ROI?
Alexander Wurm: We try to break down their story into three key areas. The first is the initial cost to go live with a solution, like the subscription and implementation costs. We also assess the ongoing costs, such as administrative costs and the people costs related to its use. And the third is we look at the benefits, which is where everyone’s interested. This can come from several different areas, but we boil that down to three categories. You could either reduce costs, improve productivity, or improve profitability. With iPaaS (integration platform as a service) and this study, the value is in reducing costs and improving productivity. There was a very measurable time savings because many of these workflows were previously done manually. There was significant value in saving that time for practitioners. Being able to take the salary of the roles, the time that they would spend on this process, and assuming that would be reallocated to more productive work. I would say that for iPaaS, time savings is where the vast majority of the ROI comes from.
Talk us through what you discovered in this case study.
Alexander Wurm: There’s a lot of complexity with systems that need to be integrated in financial services. There’s a considerable amount of regulation in how these systems interact. Because of the scale of loan processing, this becomes a big cost center for organizations if not addressed properly. The main focus of this study was really on automating workflows, namely around loan processing. For instance, during the COVID pandemic, the bank had an incredible scale of loan processing for PPP (Paycheck Protection Program) loans. They gained a significant amount of value in terms of automation and coordinating internal systems as well. They automated their loan booking, customer onboarding, and account maintenance with Boomi’s iPaaS. Previously, these were all manual processes for them, and they required labor-intensive roles to address each of these workflows.
Can any business view the benefits here and envision them in their own operations?
Alexander Wurm: Our goal is that when you get to the end of a case study, you know this is what actually happened. We try to leave the reader not with more questions about the relationship between technology and return, but instead make them consider how it could be applied to their own organization. Think of financial services as a sort of stress test. While these findings are specific to a bank with the relevant regulations, specialized systems, and volume of transactions, the higher degree of complexity showcases what these solutions look like when pushed to their limits. Any organization is going to appreciate the value they can extract from accelerating and automating their customer onboarding or just connecting internal systems. You’d be hard-pressed to find an organization that doesn’t have multiple internal systems and workflows. That, of course, is the appeal of iPaaS. Hopefully, this prompts you to consider what improving developer productivity means for my organization. What does accelerating onboarding mean? What does reducing administrative costs mean?
Sounds as if you are a translator for technical and financial audiences.
Alexander Wurm: Maybe it comes down to asking a few good, targeted questions, talking to developers and technical personas, and encouraging them to think about the higher-level value of their impact. If you can ask those two or three critical questions, you get down to the root of financial return. That could be a translator. Or maybe it’s like some of these new AI assistants that ask you follow-up questions. But I’m not automated just yet.
Speaking of AI, do you think its impact is increasing the importance of iPaaS solutions?
Alexander Wurm: It all comes down to your perspective on AI. Do you think these systems will be solely relegated to one application or one area of the business, or are these going to be systems that need to interact across the entire scope of your business? I think it’s going to be the latter. So, iPaaS is very important for bringing that together and understanding data across the organization. If you’re always operating on your back foot, spending time on manual data entry, validation, and ensuring data consistency across systems, you won’t have the foundation to build higher-level capabilities, such as AI and agents.
Are there AI trends that have your attention?
Alexander Wurm: We’re seeing AI value in being able to automate tasks that previously couldn’t be done. The ability for AI to do this in a more flexible approach to automation really unlocks value. You’re going to hear more about agents, reasoning, and all of those flashy headlines. But where organizations are seeing value is being able to take back more time in their day, automate remedial tasks, and do so in high-impact areas where there’s a lot of volume. That’s where actual value is delivered.
Download “ROI Case Study: Boomi at a Regional Bank” to view the complete financial breakdown that explains the 97% ROI.