As someone who has marketed a lot (probably hundreds) of technology products to businesses, many of them in that ever so fun "emerging technology" category, ROI is one the irritants of the job. During the 1990s boom, it was pretty easy to get around it because everyone had oodles of money to drop (although I do remember dealing with that when I was pushing speech recognition software for call centers- thankfully we had a decent ROI story). But certainly since late 2000, companies don't like to drop a whole lot of money on technology without thinking it's going to yield a large or quick return on investment (preferrably a hard dollar kind- one that goes right to the top or bottom line).
So fast forward to 2007 and the world of Enterprise 2.0 such as blogs, wikis, RSS, social networking and the like and hard dollar ROI isn't immediately apparent. The benefits are pretty clear in that you can see massive productivity increases and much more effective and efficient internal communciations and collaboration, but they don't always immediately point to monetizable savings or revenue increases in the short run.
A couple of days ago, Oliver Young from Forrester Research put out a new report called "IT Will Measure Web 2.0 Tools Like Any Other App" based on a survey of 190 IT decision-makers at U.S. firms with 500 or more employees who have deployed or are investing in Web 2.0 technologies. A couple of real interesting takeaways:
- 63% of respondents are using traditional ROI models to measure value, 54% are using user productivity surveys
- Three technologies: RSS, Podcasting and Wikis were shown to have substantial or moderate value (blogs and social networking not so much)
- Value is higher when you use one technology rather than two or three, but grows significantly when you get to four and five
So what does this mean for people like me trying to market this stuff or people responsible for championing it internally? I would take it that IT departments are working with the business users to try to come up with ROI, not just talking to finance. Second, user productivity surveys are quite important and this is where an internal champion from marketing or communications should work with their vendors and come up with good survey questions. Nearly any Web 2.0 tool should be able to show improved productivity if it's deployed in a well-thought out fashion and tries to solve specific problems. Third, once companies decide to roll-out a full-bore Enterprise 2.0 solution that incorporates four or more elements, the ROI gets even easier to see because the apps all work together.
This makes life a lot easier as far as I'm concerned. More to come.
Technorati Tags: Internal Communications, Enterprise 2.0
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