When you’re creating a digital workplace intranet, it’s essential to monitor ROI — the return on your technology investment. That means identifying useful metrics for tracking user behavior and adoption, and bringing them together in ways that help the company’s CIO, CFO and other leaders to further quantify, interpret and apply the results.
Here’s an example of how a company with 4,000 users worldwide used metrics to monitor and improve its user experience, leading to a better ROI. In the past, this company had problems with user adoption for its intranet. In order to justify upgrading the intranet, the company put great emphasis on tracking usage metrics.
When the new intranet launched, users were required to create profiles before becoming active. Tracking how many people created these profiles (and how often they updated them) was used as the first measure of success. From there, the company moved on to tracking site visits and which solutions were receiving the most use.
Tracking these metrics helped the company identify one area where use was lower than expected. Realizing that this aspect of the intranet was difficult to use, the company made an update and fixed the problem. Using real data rather than guesswork has continued to guide its approach to ongoing maintenance and platform updates.
Choosing Usage Metrics To Monitor ROI
When you’re monitoring usage, there are a variety of options to consider. Basic participation metrics might include the number of unique visitors to your company intranet. But to measure the impact on employee productivity, you need to look beyond if employees are using the intranet and determine the degree and nature of that use.
If your solution focuses on social tools, for instance, you’d want to choose metrics that track engagement and the connections people are making with each other. In a more collaborative, document-intensive environment, you might want to track how much content is being added and used. This metric might not help you understand the solution’s usability, but if you see a trend of increasing content usage and storage, you know that it’s proving useful and driving ROI.
Here are three keys when choosing metrics:
- Make sure that what you want to measure is being tracked: The tracking mechanism comes first and foremost. You can’t create a dashboard if you’re not tracking the data. Many people start creating a dashboard only to realize they don’t have the historical data they need.If you want to measure use of your email system, for example, start tracking volume and transactions from day one. If you’re talking about document management, start tracking search results, content use and findability as early as possible.
- Determine how you’re going to monitor the data: Once you decide what metrics you’re following, you need a way to monitor them weekly or (at a minimum) monthly. Many collaboration platforms and content management systems, such as SharePoint Online, come with some basic tracking capabilities. Exchange Online will receive new dashboard capabilities in the summer of 2015, as announced at the Ignite conference.If these tools aren’t powerful enough, companies typically bring in robust third-party analytics and business intelligence tools that allow them to create easily accessible dashboards. With Office 365, however, the solution includes communication and collaboration tools as well as a business intelligence platform that makes it easy to set up different ways of visualizing your metrics.
- Focus on trends: Once you have your metrics, data and dashboards in place, you should have great visibility into how the new technology is being used. At this point, it’s important to focus on monitoring the trends, rather than the absolute numbers. Are your usage metrics trending in the right direction?
When you’re investing time and money to create a digital workplace, you need a way to determine its impact on employee productivity and cost management. Tracking usage and user behavior is essential to monitor your progress toward achieving ROI.
Learn more about achieving your business objectives with modern collaboration solutions by downloading our free white paper, The Business Value of Office 365 To the Enterprise.
