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ROI Dashboard – User Experience Indicator 2

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

We need to measure what we do – that’s what we agreed on in part 1. What do we need to measure? Let’s assume we’re introducing a small state of the art 2.zeroey employee-portal in a not not small company.

The company does already run an intranet, it’s almost ten years old. People are used to it, they always complain but there’s nothing special about it.

What can be improved?

• With the new solution, it’s easier to create content, so editors can work faster.
• They have a better flow in their work, so they make less mistakes.
• The new portal offers a better navigation, so people should find content easier.
• Tags are introduced, so that should also increase findability.
• Search is improved.
• Some basic content features have been introduced, so now it is possible to create slideshows, embed videos, audios and other media – that improves the user experience and saves the editors worktime.
• Basic statistics are part of the tool (tracking the backend and the frontend).
• Wiki functionalities allow fast editing for a bigger and not so skilled audience – that saves training, editor time and user time and reduces errors.
• Blog functionalities introduce new possibilities and enhance communication.
• RSS is used for feeds – in the portal, in blogs, wikis, the other way round; they optimize the use and reuse of content.
• Comments are introduced and are a simple feedback tool for users.
• Tags, clouds, categories in the fronted are just some next generation tools in the frontend, they enhance and train the employee’s media literacy.

These are just words… They have to be transformed into measurable numbers, the numbers have to be interpretable so that they relate to values, and finally the complete package has to be transformed somewhere into money.

The desired improvements have to be transformed into trackable metrics: What are the indicators, can they be found in the cms/portal?

The metrics need to be clustered into rememorable topics, and they need a visualisation: create charts, get sample data, build words and their stories.

Finally, an obvious connection between the indicators, their behaviour and the financial development of the project has to be made visible.

Visualization: Key Values based on easily trackable indicators.

But step by step.

• In the current project, four main values could be identified: Effiency, Satisfaction, Quality, Impact. Each of these values is based on several metrics, these metrics can be combined to several graphs that indicate trends and development.
• This leads to a balanced-scorecard-like environment, where small changes on a basic level are aggregated to effects on a visible level, on a level that can be communicated on a senior management level: You don’t have to say “We are having less usercomments than last month”, but you can say “Our portal is loosing on impact”; you don’t have to talk about painful cms editor-tools, but you can talk about efficience in the work of editors or about increasing or decreasing cost per content or cost per user.
• Changes on the value level finally have to be translated into financial dynamics: where do changes in the techy metrics in the underground make you loose money, where do they make you win some?

Relations and data are quite complex by now, but it is really important to keep the dynamic parts really simple and related to as little data sources as possible – preferrably only one: Everything that comes out of the portal can be measured in the portal; everything else should have to be defined only once.

This is what we will cover in the next part.

Part 1: ROI – social media metrics based on investments in the future

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ROI – social media metrics based on investments in the future

Image by ~C4Chaos via Flickr

I attended five social media, intranet or other online media conferences this year. I met some hundred experienced media managers, online directors, software providers or consultants.
And I asked every single one of them (if I talked to them more than three or five sentences), how they measure the ROI of their 2.0 intiatives and what business cases they used to get their funding.

Not one did express it in cash.

Some mentioned ROC – Return of Change, some took the low costs as an argument for not caring about revenues, others took detours with more or less complex thought experiments, others use a lot of opportunity costs in their reasoning (what would you loose if you are not among the first movers).

That’s not really surprising. But actually – it is surprising, Businesses do run on money, they need to make more than they spend, so why could they be so relaxed in measuring success? Im am afraid, that they are not. Maybe some initiatives have been started without business case or roi calculation, but they will probably be the first to be stopped as soon as there are any restrictions or cost cuttings coming up.

Easy starting, low entry costs, lightweight scalability are good attributes of 2.0 media. But every minute that our employees spend in the office counts.
The ROI for entire portal projects may be based on usability improvements that save 2 minutes per employee per day (=app. 40 minutes per month, =400.000 minutes per month for 10.000 employees, =6.666 hours per month =533.333 Euros per month). And on the other hand we should invite people to play?
If each employee spends only three hours on a tool we have to throw away after three months, that are 30.000 hours per tool (or per three months), 120.000 hours per year which are 9.600.000 Euros per year (more than 9 millions). So even if only 5 percent of employees use it – that is a lot of money (480.000 Euros).

Is that a cannibalization of business cases? Are we saving and wasting the time of our employees in the same project, at the same time?
This is an issue of responsibility in planning, of scalability and sustainability in our tools. Lightweight trial and error processes are great in small environments; they don’t work in enterprise environments:

• It is a not so lightweight process to find testers
• enterprise usecases need big documents, big processes and big communities for testing – or they will just not be realistic
• introducing a tool (even as friendly user only, limited support not warranty testrun) can be a big pain; removing a tool can be pain as well (users will keep asking for the old one instead of using the new one)
• How do you want to decide on if it is a success or not, how can you analyze usage data – once your audience has been more than 20 people? Sounds like another lot of work.

In the enterprise, you may feel more comfortable with scalable integrated solutions that can be extended using plugins, adding templates or investing some development work – but then can be extended somehow. You may want to keep your data in the same database with the same database model, you may want to continue using the same editor instead of doing new training for your employees, introducing new support structures etc.

That sounds like an old integration imperative taking over on 2.0
Actually I look at it as a way to ensure the success of 2.0 against or in the enterprise… You have to talk the language of the enterprise if you want to be successful there. ROI or Satisfaction Dashboards would be cool features of 2.0 software. Stay tuned to learn more.

Part 2: ROI Dashboard – User Experience Indicator 2

 

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