I attended five social media, intranet or other online media conferences this year. I met some hundred experienced media managers, online directors, software providers or consultants.
And I asked every single one of them (if I talked to them more than three or five sentences), how they measure the ROI of their 2.0 intiatives and what business cases they used to get their funding.
Not one did express it in cash.
Some mentioned ROC - Return on Change, some took the low costs as an argument for not caring about revenues, others took detours with more or less complex thought experiments, others use a lot of opportunity costs in their reasoning (what would you loose if you are not among the first movers).
That's not really surprising. But actually - it is surprising, Businesses do run on money, they need to make more than they spend, so why could they be so relaxed in measuring success? Im am afraid, that they are not. Maybe some initiatives have been started without business case or roi calculation, but they will probably be the first to be stopped as soon as there are any restrictions or cost cuttings coming up.
Easy starting, low entry costs, lightweight scalability are good attributes of 2.0 media. But every minute that our employees spend in the office counts.
The ROI for entire portal projects may be based on usability improvements that save 2 minutes per employee per day (=app. 40 minutes per month, =400.000 minutes per month for 10.000 employees, =6.666 hours per month =533.333 Euros per month). And on the other hand we should invite people to play?
If each employee spends only three hours on a tool we have to throw away after three months, that are 30.000 hours per tool (or per three months), 120.000 hours per year which are 9.600.000 Euros per year (more than 9 millions). So even if only 5 percent of employees use it - that is a lot of money (480.000 Euros).
Is that a cannibalization of business cases? Are we saving and wasting the time of our employees in the same project, at the same time?
This is an issue of responsibility in planning, of scalability and sustainability in our tools. Lightweight trial and error processes are great in small environments; they don't work in enterprise environments:
- It is a not so lightweight process to find testers
- enterprise usecases need big documents, big processes and big communities for testing - or they will just not be realistic
- introducing a tool (even as friendly user only, limited support not warranty testrun) can be a big pain; removing a tool can be pain as well (users will keep asking for the old one instead of using the new one)
- How do you want to decide on if it is a success or not, how can you analyze usage data - once your audience has been more than 20 people? Sounds like another lot of work.
In the enterprise, you may feel more comfortable with scalable integrated solutions that can be extended using plugins, adding templates or investing some development work - but then can be extended somehow. You may want to keep your data in the same database with the same database model, you may want to continue using the same editor instead of doing new training for your employees, introducing new support structures etc.
That sounds like an old integration imperative taking over on 2.0
Actually I look at it as a way to ensure the success of 2.0 against or in the enterprise... You have to talk the language of the enterprise if you want to be successful there. ROI or Satisfaction Dashboards would be cool features of 2.0 software. Stay tuned to learn more.
kbex Blog deals with communication, collaboration and the philosophy of media: ideas around intranets, internet, e commerce, social media, and online media in general. it serves as a best practise repository and sometimes reports from conferences.