As a Business Manager or a CIO in your enterprise, you are always evaluating the benefits of implementing new solutions by applying the cost benefit analysis methodologies. By applying these studies you aim for knowing which solution will yield the greatest benefit to the enterprise.

Understanding and quantifying the costs and benefits of each option are necessary to answer the preceding question. In other words, the cost benefit analysis finds, quantifies, and adds all the positive factors and mark them as benefits. Then identifies, quantifies, and subtracts all the negatives, the costs. The difference between the two indicates whether the planned action is advisable. The real trick to doing a cost benefit analysis well is making sure you include all the costs and all the benefits and properly quantify them. Since the cost benefit analysis relies on the addition of positive factors and the subtraction of negative ones to determine a net result, it is also known as running the numbers. Increasingly, project managers are asked to evaluate the cost versus the benefit of undertaking a business intelligence (BI) project. Several financial measures can be applied but the commonly accepted financial measure is ROI.