When technology initiatives directly impact a line of business, calculating the return on investment (ROI) is relatively straightforward, but what about investing time and money in enterprise collaboration and social tools? When the technology’s intent is to improve internal collaboration and engagement, that value is more difficult to quantify.
If you’re advocating for the adoption of a collaboration platform or social enterprise technology, remember that the value derives over time from use, as employees work on projects together over a longer term. A platform like SharePoint 2013 brings these tools together. The social features add a layer of conversation to documents and document management, making it easy for teams to share links, documents and meeting details with each other.
A longer-term perspective is vital, because you won’t truly know how effective these tools are until they’ve been in the hands of real users. Fortunately, the options for licensing collaboration and social platforms through the cloud have lowered the cost of upfront investments, which makes experimenting with different solutions less risky from a financial standpoint.
If your IT environment is able to capture analytics for your project and collaboration sites, you could make the use case in part by measuring the number of sites that are being created, the ways those sites are used and the retirement of those sites after a project has been completed. Social enterprise tools could be measured along similar lines, by tracking how many Yammer groups are created, for example, and how many meetings are no longer necessary because people are sharing information in real time, rather than saving it up for a weekly status update.
In calculating ROI for the time and money that go into social and collaboration tools, the key is to demonstrate their impact in terms of time savings and productivity. In sales teams and call centers, for example, implementing social enterprise software might increase the number of calls a user is able to conduct, because the system makes necessary information a lot more accessible. This improved internal interaction and information access might also affect how many trouble tickets or customer satisfaction tickets an employee is able to resolve.
When implemented correctly, collaboration solutions improve information retention, strengthen security and streamline content management. But these tools also affect how people work, so collaboration and social tools need to be tailored to your user base and how it works.
Calculating the ROI for enterprise collaboration and social technology is difficult, because it supports internal processes, rather than making a clear impact on a business line. That’s all the more reason to emphasize user adoption, not only when launching the project, but as an ongoing commitment. Continuing with training programs after the initial release and continuing to cultivate champions for the project are important ways to strengthen a collaboration culture and ensure a successful technology implementation.
