Given today's budgets, asking for cash to clean up employee profiles and consolidate customer lists may seem a bit impudent. But the administrative savings alone make identity management a serious candidate for funding, according to a recent study: If a 10,000-employee company automated password-resetting alone, help-desk calls can drop by one-third and the firm could save $648,000 each year. "And there are many more efficiencies to take into account," says Robert Johnson, a vice president at Meta Group Consulting. Those projections come from a survey conducted by Meta Group Consulting as part of an engagement to build an identity management ROI calculator for PricewaterhouseCoopers. (To learn more about PwC's ROI calculator, please visit www.pwcglobal.com/roi.) The survey of 420 companies with annual revenues of $500M or greater asked business and technology executives to estimate their potential savings from identity management.

Get an idea of your own costs by filling in the blanks in the chart below. The averaged results of the PwC survey appear below for comparison purposes.