Baseline: Off-The-Charts Results

At least that's what companies that performed well in the 2004 Baseline-Nucleus Research Technology ROI Awards competition demonstrated.

Take the Grand Prize winner, Harrah's Entertainment, the Las Vegas casino giant.

Harrah's generated a triple-digit return of 389% by implementing a data warehouse that allows the company to identify and concentrate on the customers who will reward Harrah's with the most revenue.

But Harrah's is not the only organization managing data well. In the Public Sector category, the state of Iowa's Department of Revenue generated a quadruple-digit return of 1,140% with a data warehouse project. Intermountain Healthcare of Salt Lake City won the Innovation category with an even greater return of 1,484%.

As with the inaugural ROI Awards in 2003, winners are judged soley on returns, except for the Grand Prize, which also weighs project impact on the overall business. All entrants submit detailed cost and return information on significant information systems projects that they undertook in the past three years. The results were verified by Nucleus Research, a Waltham, Mass., consulting firm.

Here are the projects with the best returns over the past three years for their organizations.