It’s very challenging but important to measure return-on-investment (ROI) for social enterprise tools, both in qualitative terms such as an improved user experience and quantitative terms like reduced time to find information. Christian Buckley discusses these challenges in an article for AIIM.
As it stands now, everyone is trying to figure out if they should continue on this path of increasing emphasis on social features and whether it’s going to be worthwhile in the end. Is social here to stay? Is it the new direction of technology and enterprise information management? Will it replace email? Does it help or hurt productivity? Those are all legitimate questions, and they’re also difficult questions to answer.
A good approach to finding whether social can be valuable in your organization is to pick two business issues that you’re looking to tackle and use social technologies as ways to help solve those problems. It could be something like collaborating across departments and geographic areas or finding expertise across your organization.
You can then evaluate different technologies to help meet those objectives. If social tools seem like the best fit, great. If not, you don’t need to put them in place just to say you have them. The key concept here — and it applies in many areas beyond social — is to use the tools in context for specific business use cases.
Buckley highlights the importance of passive analytics, such as measuring page hits and comments. He notes that it’s important not only to have these analytics tools in place, but to make an effort to measure them over time, and look for correlations between changes to the system and changes in user behavior.
Those are great ideas that can certainly help measure and social ROI, but we also think active analytics are important to measure. So be sure to take into account the softer side, looking at the measurement of satisfaction, like anecdotes about how the technology is improving the work experience for users.
Source: AIIM, January 2014
