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Jack Vinson argued recently that success for E2.0 can’t be measured by ROI. It reminded me of Sam Lawrence’s 10 ROI charts you can’t live without, a tongue-in-cheek collection of graphs without a single hard number on them.
Return on investment is a big issue for companies investigating Enterprise 2.0 solutions. But the bigger issue is using return on investment as a yardstick in the first place.
Corporate metrics for Enterprise 2.0 implementations are extremely hard to come by. There are many reasons for this. One is simply that the technology is new. Another is that many organizations simply don’t gather them. A third reason is that companies tend to keep successes under wraps. After all, the last thing they want is to give away their new-found competitive advantage to the competition. And if successes are kept quiet, you can only image what lengths organizations will go to to hide project failures.
Don’t bother looking for numbers. The statistics just aren’t there. If you even think of framing E2.0 success in terms of ROI, you’re doomed to failure. You have to rely on other measures of success.
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3 Comments
Bertrand Duperrin
I also find it hard to find relevant numbers inside tools. But since what’s happening online is supposed to support business practices, I think we have to look out the tools and see how using them makes people better at their every day job, which needs few concrete business oriented indicators.
I don’t think that tools have to be measured by themselves, but that the results of the whole E2.0 approach (tools + practices +…) may and have to be.
26 Oct 2008 05:10 am
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