Calculate RoI or LoI? - Enterprise 2.0

Thanks to everyone who took time out to fill up the responses of our survey on Enterprise. In my subsequent posts, I will give short glimpse of the project which we had done. Can’t post the document in its entirety due to confidential details!!

Any discussion on Enterprise 2.0 eventually leads to discussion on what is the return on investment in Enterprise .0 and here are some of the findings.

Calculating ROI for Enterprise 2.0 investment is largely difficult due to the inherent nature of benefits which it displays. Results of collaboration between employees or customers which these technologies are usually seen over a longer period of time and might also go unnoticed. The increased revenue and reduction in costs in marketing and sales costs are also one of the results of employing Enterprise 2.0. We have mentioned usage of Microblogging as a marketing agent above but calculating the return from this infrastructure or resource is difficult.

Collaboration leads to creation of massive database of knowledge and training material. Once an organization has the required platform, the benefits which an employee or customer gain are usually not monitored or monetized. A readily available BoK might reduce the learning curve for an employee but it is hard to put it in financial terms.

There are ways however to try and calculate some returns if an organization finds innovative ways of putting new ideas to use which result out of collaboration. In a research done by Datamonitor, they comment that ROI can be calculated for large scale deployments of Enterprise 2.0 through the principle of Metcalfe’s Law. Basically it boils down to the number of users in the system and due to the communication channels which result.

It is largely acknowledged that Enterprise 2.0 results in lowering costs of various business processes like –

• Enterprise Wikis and other collaboration tools benefit the training within an organization

• Collaboration leads to Project management simplification by reducing formal structure, meetings etc.

• Reduced costs in Sales and Marketing – already discussed above.

What one could do is measure the benefits of real time data acquisition of heterogeneous data sources, structured data capture, and the value of real time manipulation of security domains for applications. Blogs, Wikis, and Forums are all text (String) based idioms. They are hard to search for pertinent information and not easy categorized due to their weak types. Information captured and difficult to query might as well not exist it's like having money in your couch - it's there but most likely it's not worth the search. Check out the Walmart use case of technology and translate that into intranets, extranets, and internet on stationary and mobile devices and their is a good chance people will take notice. Wall Street is a prime example of he who sees data first wins.

In conclusion, even if you can't quantify ROI one can calculate LOI - Loss on Investment. Fear of loss sometimes motivates better than desire!!