Finding Intranet ROI (Whitepaper)

Finding ROI
Measuring Intranet Investments

A Prescient Whitepaper
Version 9.0 | Updated April 2009

Finding ROI 1
© 2001-2009 Prescient Digital Media

TABLE OF CONTENTS

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY ............................................................. 4

INTRODUCTION ......................................................................... 6

ROI DILEMMA ............................................................................ 9

INHERENT VALUE .................................................................... 10

BENEFITS ................................................................................. 12

INTRANET 2.0 .......................................................................... 23

ENTERPRISE INFORMATION PORTALS .................................. 28

KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT (KM) ........................................ 32

WEB CONTENT MANAGEMENT (WCM) ................................. 37

HUMAN RESOURCES ............................................................. 42

PROCUREMENT ...................................................................... 46

HIGH-VALUE WEB APPLICATIONS ......................................... 49

EMPHASIS ON PLANNING ...................................................... 51

MORE THAN MONEY .............................................................. 55

ROI STUDY FINDINGS ............................................................. 58

ABOUT PRESCIENT................................................................. 65

This documentation is proprietary and is protected by Canadian, U.S. and international copyright laws and
trade secret laws. Copyright © 2001-2009 Prescient Digital Media Ltd., all rights reserved. No part of this
documentation may be reproduced, copied, modified or distributed by anyone in any form or by any means
without the express written authorization of Prescient Digital Media.

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G L O S S A R Y:

RETURN ON INVESTMENT (ROI)
A measurement, expressed as a percentage, of the total value of a
given investment divided by the cost of the investment. Example: a
$100 investment is worth $133 one year later, yielding a one-year ROI of
33.3%.

INTRANET
A private network, similar to the Internet and using the same protocols
and technology, that is contained within an enterprise. It may consist
of many inter-linked local area networks (LANs), desktop computers,
websites and portals, and email system(s).

CORPORATE PORTAL
A primary website on the enterprise intranet. A web-based gateway to
most, if not all, tools and information on the enterprise intranet. The portal
can be a ‘catch all’ for all of the intranet, or a business unit or function
specific portal (i.e. Sales or HR portal).

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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
As with any critical business system, an intranet or portal must deliver
measurable performance and remain accountable to the investment. If
the site’s value is not being measured, then it risks failing the needs and
demands of employees and management.

When asked how executives determine whether an intranet or portal
is delivering value, most people typically point to reducing costs and
improving productivity.

Of course, IT budgets are increasingly tied to company-wide business and
strategic initiatives. The cost justification for any expenditure, including
IT must have a clear bottom line that answers the question, “What’s the
payback?”

In recent years, business challenges and subsequent solutions/
applications have been the driving force behind intranet investments. They
will continue to play this role in the future.

Executives will make investments in intranets and portals (see definition
in the adjacent glossary) if such investments spur growth, cut the cost of
operations, and/or help enhance the customer experience (retaining and
building the customer base).

The challenging economic climate means that more and more
organizations will allocate dollars to IT systems and applications that
can demonstrate a measured solution and ROI to a business problem or
provide enhanced service and growth.

ROI A N A L Y S I S:

AGGRESSIVE STUDIES:
ROI: > 1000% > payback in 8-24 weeks

CONSERVATIVE STUDIES:
ROI: 23% to 88% > payback in 1-2 years

Measuring the precise value of an intranet or portal is likely impossible. It
is, at best, an imperfect science. However, more and more organizations
are measuring the ROI of their intranet investment.

While only a handful of technology companies measured intranet
ROI a few years ago, there are encouraging signs of change. A study,

Finding ROI 4

conducted by Prescient Digital Media Ltd., found that 6% of organizations
undertake ongoing, specific measurement of the ROI of their intranet,
while occasional measurement is undertaken by 26% of the respondent
organizations.

While extensive ROI measurement has not yet become mandatory at a
majority of organizations with intranets, ROI is considered a priority by
76% of the survey respondents.

Unimportant 6
How important
is the ROI of Somewhat unimportant 6
your intranet or Neither important nor unimportant 6
portal to your
organization? Somewhat important 36
Very important 40
Don’t know 5
Total 100%

Rather than attempt to measure the
R O I S T U D Y: intranet or portal’s entire value, those
companies that are successfully gauging
Of the respondents to the value are measuring specific benefits.
Prescient Digital Media This paper lists intranet benefits in
ROI survey that undertake 10 key categories – including hard
‘rough estimates’ of their costs, increased revenue, etc. – with
organization’s intranet, two supporting categories: content
answers varied from $0 to management and procurement.
$20 million. The average
annual ROI of respondent The precision, scope of work and
intranets fell just shy of execution required to build and maintain
$1 million ($979,775.58). a successful intranet or portal is
massive – from governance to content
While less than 20% management, and from technology to
of organizations have business processes. At the heart of a
measured specific successful intranet is the strength of
benefits, a majority of the underlying plan. Failure to develop
organizations have at the an integrated plan that accounts for an
very least made a ‘rough organization’s structure, stakeholder and
estimate’ or guess of the user requirements will almost certainly
value of their ROI. ensure failure and, with it, a loss of
significant time, money and jobs.

Finally, while appraising the ROI of an
intranet or portal is critical for most
executives, there exists a great deal of untapped, intangible value that is
perhaps even more critical than the measured dollars and cents. When
properly deployed, intranets improve communication, collaboration and
employee satisfaction, which in turn can improve productivity. All benefits
are clearly important to any organization, but not always a measurable
ROI.
Finding ROI 5

INTRODUCTION
The following ‘white paper’ is intended
to stimulate thought and discussion for
measuring the return on intranet and A META Group study
corporate portal investment. revealed that 80% of
surveyed companies
It also documents different benchmarks realize a positive ROI with
and success stories of leading enterprises an average annual return
that successfully measure such value. of 38%.

Intranets and corporate portals are An IDC survey found
widely valued for: streamlining business that an average intranet
processes and driving operational investment of about
efficiencies; enhancing communications US$1 million at six
and collaboration between employees, leading companies
management, customers, and partners; returned benefits of US$5
and significantly reducing the cost of million per company.
internal business functions; and (Source: IDC SURVEY:
increasing company sales (revenue). HR Intranets, Corporate
However, intranets and corporate portals Leadership Council, June 1999;
can be extremely complex systems and, META SURVEY: Microsoft.com)
therefore, at times, expensive endeavors.

Despite the expense, many organizations
understand the implicit and/or explicit
value and are willing to make notable
intranet investments. A study, published in 2002 by the UK Department of
Trade and Industry, revealed intranet and extranet adoption at about 60%
of North American, UK, German and Swedish companies. A 2001 META
Group study of Global 2000 companies found an adoption rate of 85% for
implemented or developing intranets. It is not only large multi-nationals
that understand the benefits and potential rewards of a well-funded, high-
value intranet. According to Modalis Research, more than 70% of all small
and medium-sized businesses, including government agencies and not-
for-profit organizations, believe that having an intranet is important and
either have an intranet or plan to deploy one (2001 study).

C A S E S T U D Y:

Cisco System’s intranet portal, Cisco Connection Online, is the
source of much pride and significant ROI for the California-based
technology giant. While Cisco clearly understands the inherent
value of the intranet, it also carefully tracks and measures specific
ROI benefits including purchasing, expense reporting, printing and
distribution, and more. Cisco estimates that the total ROI savings for
its entire intranet in fiscal 2003 surpassed $2.1 billion.

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The growing popularity of portals, perhaps the hottest intranet system or
application today, was highlighted in a report by Gartner, which estimates
the enterprise portal market as a whole grew at a rate of 16.5 percent and
now tops $1.1 billion. In fact, IBM estimates that the portal market topped
$1.4 billion in 2008 (with IBM leading this market segment with about
1/3 of all sales). However, despite the investment, very few organizations
measure the value of the investment.

While early intranet deployments benefited communications, sales
and marketing, and human resources, other corporate areas including
operations, manufacturing, customer service, engineering, finance, and IS/
IT are also reaping the rewards. However, while implicitly understanding
an intranet’s value is second nature for many leading organizations,
measuring the value remains a significant challenge.

C A S E S T U D Y:

Rogers Communications is a major
telecommunications company with
over 100 locations across Canada.
With its national reach and need
to remain competitive, Rogers
implemented a new corporate-wide
HR portal. Prior to doing so Rogers
engaged in a thorough assessment of
its internal environment as a precursor
to developing a strategic plan.

The ensuing plan included detailed functional recommendations,
the information structure detailing the portal’s navigation, creative
design, content recommendations, and a business case indicating
current and future ROI.

Before the implementation of the new corporate-wide HR portal,
Rogers faced efficiency and practical issues such as multiple intranet
sites in each operating company, content that was not maintained or
badly maintained, and duplication of information on various sites.

The plan saw the creation of a new enterprise HR portal,
HR Xpress. The new portal attracted greater use and an increased
awareness of other intranet sites for an estimated $100,000 in annual
administrative savings.

(Source: Wendy Chiu, Rogers Communications,
Federated Press, September 2002)

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Once planned, executed and launched, an Internet, intranet or extranet
site cannot rest on its laurels. The pace of technology, customer and
employee demands, and competitive pressure require that an intranet
achieve and exceed expectations and continually show measured value.

As with any critical business system, the intranet must be delivering
measurable performance and remain accountable to the investment. If
you are not measuring your site’s value, then you risk failing the needs and
demands of customers, employees and management.

To receive regular updates or to subscribe to the monthly newsletter Intranet
Insight, visit www.prescientdigital.com

Finding ROI 8

ROI DILEMMA
Appraising the value of corporate intranet While 76% of
and portal investments is, at best, an respondent
imperfect science. In fact, most analysts organizations believe
contend that precise ROI measurement ROI to be important
is not possible due to an intranet’s or very important, only
expansive and far-reaching nature. 6% of organizations
However, while measuring the precise undertake ongoing,
ROI may not be achievable, there are specific measurement of
means by which many organizations the ROI of their intranet.
can and do quantify both potential and
existing ROI.

Generally speaking, intranet ROI can be lumped into one of three broad
categories:
1. Hard savings that result from the cost avoidance of printing or
distributing documents
2. Latent, soft savings from enhanced access to information,
communication, collaboration, and decision-making, among other
things
3. Increased revenue as a result of an intranet implementation

The principal challenge for appraising intranet ROI is that it is often easier
to assess the ROI of specific applications deployed on an intranet than
measure the ROI of infrastructure and/or the portal itself. In fact, most
demonstrable ROI case studies highlight application ROI – such as
employee self-service and e-procurement – rather than the ROI of the
entire intranet or portal. Hence the chicken-or-egg dilemma: you cannot
aggregate and deploy high-value web applications without the underlying
infrastructure, but it is difficult to justify the infrastructure investment
without the greatly desired ROI from such high-value applications.

Not at all 23
To what extent is your
organization measuring Only guesswork 24
the ROI of your intranet
or portal? Considering measuring 18

Occasional measuring 24

Ongoing significant measuring 6

Don’t know 4

Total 100%

Undoubtedly, this challenge is one of the key factors why so many
organizations value ROI, but few are measuring it. Prescient’s Intranet
ROI study found that while 76% of respondent organizations believe ROI
to be important or very important, only 6% of organizations undertake
ongoing, specific measurement of the ROI of their intranet. Occasional

Finding ROI 9

measurement is done by only 24% of organizations and 51% either do no
measurement (or guess).

Finally, while most ROI is thought to come from specific applications,
it is important not to lose sight of the role the intranet home page and
information architecture in delivering this application ROI. It is helpful to
think of the intranet as the “shopping mall” to the application “stores”.
Why do stores like the Gap, Target, Nordstrom’s, etc. locate in malls?
Malls exist because they attract a lot of shoppers and therefore retailers
like the Gap are willing to pay a lot of rent to realize the sales and ROI
that come from those shoppers. If the shopping mall doesn’t exist, a lot
of retailers lose out. The stores don’t get the sales, and they don’t get the
ROI.

The intranet benefits applications as the mall benefits stores; intranets
drive traffic to applications which reap the big ROI.

C A S E S T U D Y:

A European hospital intranet had 8,000 different guideline
documents (e.g. relating to medical procedures, etc.) – with no
search engine. Traditionally, users (doctors and other professionals)
had to navigate a folder structure. A discussion with the hospital’s
risk manager revealed that the hospital spent $5 million in insurance.
But, if they could put in a search engine to help doctors find medical
guidelines within 30 seconds, they could reduce their insurance
substantially.

The hospital spent $100,000 on the search engine, and received full
pay-back within 3 months, and saved $1 million in insurance as a
result.

(Source: Martin White,
Intranet Focus, 2009

INHERENT VALUE
It is the less tangible, inherent intranet benefits that are the most difficult
to measure, and potentially the most valuable.

The implicitly understood and inherent worth of a corporate intranet
is often likened to the value of a telephone system. As with the phone
system, most organizations, if asked, could ascribe an inherent, latent
value to the intranet. Has your organization ever been asked to measure
the ROI of its phone system? Not likely. Most people and organizations
inherently know and understand the value of the phone and don’t require
Finding ROI 10

a detailed ROI balance sheet. Most organizations and executives know full
well that the telephone is a mission-critical instrument for most, if not all,
organizations. In many ways, intranets are like telephone systems – they
assist us in accomplishing mission-critical work all the time. Yet, much of
their value is latent, with unseen savings that are inherently or implicitly
understood.

Likening a robust intranet or corporate portal to a telephone system
will help to illustrate your case, but it likely won’t persuade your CFO or
accountant to open the vault. To do that, you need to provide tangible,
measured intranet ROI.

There are three general approaches for measuring intranet ROI:

1. Ascribe the intranet a value equal to the investment, dollar in equals
dollar out
2. Ascribe a non-monetary value to the intranet as a collaborative
communication and knowledge management asset
3. Measure and appraise specific benefits from implementing an
intranet and/or corporate portal

The first two approaches are rather obvious, but should not be ignored
by any organization. However the third approach – measuring specific
benefits – is the most precise and tangible means for quantifying intranet
ROI. To this end, the ROI measurement of specific intranet benefits is the
focus of this paper.

C A S E S T U D Y:

In 2000, brash Oracle CEO Larry Ellison made waves when
he announced Oracle would save US$1 billion in operation
efficiencies through their internal e-business initiatives.

Oracle’s 2000 savings include $200 million from consolidated IT;
$550 million in improved customer relationship management
(CRM); $150 million in e-procurement savings; and $100 million in
savings from employee self-service tools (particularly HR tools).

In 2001, Oracle forecasted an expected savings of $2 billion with
the majority coming from improved CRM.

(Source: Bill Bergen, President, Oracle Canada, “Business
Without Boundaries,” May 29, 2001)

Finding ROI 11

BENEFITS
There are many ways to organize and
segment the measurable benefits Verizon’s intranet portal,
from intranet investments. While Ventana, supports the
this paper opened by dividing ROI telecommunications company’s
into three general categories – hard wholesale operations centers.
savings, soft benefits (savings) Six thousand users – including
and increased revenue – these are internal call centre staff, service
general in nature and do not provide reps, and senior management
a framework for actual measurement. – use the portal for message
boards, information on
For the purpose of understanding methods and procedures, tariff
ROI measurement from a macro and regulatory information, and
perspective, these generic maintenance data.
categorizations suffice. To fully
understand the full potential of an The portal also delivers more
intranet for an organization seeking efficient communications. Prior
a more explicit approach, we can to the portal, reports were sent
undertake an even more detailed out to 900 users three times
means of segmenting ROI. a day by email. Now each
report is posted on the portal,
A glimpse into the expected eliminating
and measurable ROI benefits 15 million emails per year – and
at a standard organization was the attached documents to
highlighted in a survey conducted each.
by Darwinmag.com in 2001. Darwin
asked 138 business executives
to rank the top five goals or (Source: Goodwin & Nielsen,
expectations from their Information Building Intranet Portals: A
Technology investments. Report From the Trenches,
April 2003)
Looking back on past year,
executives ranked their expectations
as:

1. Empower employees with access to information
2. Create/increase competitive advantage
3. Improve customer service
4. Reduce cost of doing business
5. Improve efficiency

However, looking forward to the upcoming year, the rankings changed and
the original top expectation did not even make the list:

1. Create/Increase competitive advantage
2. Reduce cost of doing business
3. Improve efficiency
4. Improve customer service
5. Generate more revenue
Finding ROI 12

To meet these expectations and to
plan to deliver specific ROI, and to Intranet Benefits
measure this value, a more detailed
approach is required. To offer a 1. Hard Costs
general framework for examining 2. Sales
and measuring the potential ROI in 3. Productivity
organizations, Prescient segments 4. Competitiveness
intranet benefits into 10 broad 5. Application Access
categories. 6. Infrastructure
7. Collaboration
Specific examples and case studies 8. Time To Market
for each of the areas above are 9. Customer Service
offered in the following pages. 10. Human Resources

C A S E S T U D Y:

Mitre Corp., a not-for-profit technology company that services several US
federal agencies, has measured staff productivity in a number of critical
areas:

Time Submission: By moving manual timecard submission and tracking to
the intranet, employees save an estimated 1 minute per day.

• Expenses: By reconciling expenses on the intranet, each employee
saves about 2 minutes per day

• Content Management: With advanced content management allowing
for greater ease of converting and publishing documents, employees
save an estimated average of 5 minutes per day

• Help Desk: By moving help information online, help desk staff save an
average of 8 minutes per call

• Job Pricing: By automating key price information, job pricers save
about 1 hour per pricing job

By multiplying the time savings by the salaries of employees (using a
conservative estimate of three-quarters of employees), Mitre estimates that
their intranet affords $12.8 million in improved staff productivity.
(Source: Debby Young, CIO Web
Business Magazine, May 1, 2000)

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1. HARD COSTS
Hard cost savings and avoidance – from paper reduction and reduced
information distribution, to labor reductions – are the most commonly
reported ROI benefits, and perhaps the easiest to find and calculate.

BENEFITS:
• Reduced paper printing and circulation
• Software downloads rather than manual installation
• Headcount reduction and savings resulting from automated functions
• Reduced or eliminated processing errors

2. SALES
Many successful sales organizations rely on sales software and web
applications to improve their sales success. Online sales tools allow sales
representatives to access greater volumes and media-rich (multimedia)
information faster than previously possible – driving increases in sales.
Intranet sales tools vary from applications that allow the sales force to enter
and access customer data, track sales leads, forecast sales and profit
margins, schedule joint meetings and more.

BENEFITS:
• Better customer service leading to more sales
• Reduced time to market for promotions
• Increased collaboration amongst sales people
• Enhanced collaboration between reps and customers
• Migration of sales brochures to the web

C A S E S T U D Y:

PR agency Ketchum deployed
a portal to increase sales for the
company. Using an independent
research firm, META Group, it was
estimated that the Ketchum intranet
could lead to revenue growth between
0.5% (conservative estimate) and 5%
(liberal estimate).

Using 2000 revenues of $167 million as a baseline and a compound
annual growth rate of 10%, Ketchum could increase its sales by
$18,350,640 (using moderate estimates) over 3 years.

(Source: META Group, myKGN: A Return-on-Investment Study,
June 19, 2001)

Finding ROI 14

C A S E S T U D Y:

The SodhexoUSA intranet (see Best practices case study: Sodexho
USA) features a highly innovative, and valuable sales generating tool.
SuperSleuth is an intranet application that encourages employees
to submit sales leads and prospective clients via the intranet.
Successful leads submitted via the SuperSleuth intranet page
generate cash rewards of up to $1000 for the person making the
submission. Sodexho says it has contributed to a 100% increase
in sales leads in the past year and led to US$90 million dollars in
managed volume (net client sales including sales by client).

SuperSleuth is an intranet based tool that would be no means
receive that volume of leads nor generate the dollars it does without
the intranet to drive those leads. The intranet home page promotes
the tool and generates the traffic that reaps the reward.

4. COMPETITIVENESS
“An organization will only be
competitive if it can learn faster
than its competitors,” is a favorite By moving all HR policy and
saying of renowned tech writer benefits information online,
and speaker Don Tapscott. It’s no the Bank of Montreal (BMO)
secret that intranets are becoming has accrued many savings
the cornerstones of knowledge from the elimination of paper,
management (KM) and learning at fax, copying postage, courier
leading Fortune 500 companies. costs, etc.
With faster access to greater
volumes and more accurate Notwithstanding these hard
information and knowledge, users costs savings, BMO measures
are driving organizations to learn the savings from reduced
and respond more quickly in the processing or “finding” time
marketplace. by HR personnel (to find
and pass on information) at
BENEFITS: approximately $700,000 per
• Just-in-time access (access year.
when needed)
• Improved access to internal (Source: Sally Grande, BMO,
and competitive data “The Journey from HR Intranet
• Improved information sharing to “e-HR”, June 28, 2001)
(KM)
• Opportunities for new business

Finding ROI 15

5. APPLICATION ACCESS Employee productivity surveys
Productivity is also determined by have revealed that employees
the technology employed by the in an average corporate
user, including hardware, platform, environment can spend
and browser. By aggregating between 30 – 60% of their
application access under the productive time just searching
corporate portal, all users will for information to do their job.
be able to benefit with access To reduce their knowledge
to previously unused or seldom deficit Shell International
used tools. Access speed is also invested US$6 million in a KM
greatly increased as users access solution to facilitate improved
applications regardless of their information and knowledge
location, which also improves exchange amongst its 10,000
employee productivity. employees. A review of
operations concluded that
BENEFITS: the KM solution is generating
• Centralized access to multiple annual benefits of at least $300
applications and platforms million – or an annual ROI of
• Desktop access by all 5000%.
employees, from anywhere
• Home access enables
(Source: ““KM ROI””, Ideas
employees to work remotely
Magazine, May, 2001)
• Multiple, cross-platform
integration is reduced

6. INFRASTRUCTURE
Mainframe, legacy and proprietary systems and applications are
expensive to buy, maintain and staff. Utilizing Internet technology as the
foundation for the corporate intranet can save organizations a great deal
of money – in both capital and maintenance costs.

BENEFITS:
• Reduction of server and client
operating costs
• Special training for web Legacy electronic data
applications users is eliminated interchange (EDI) systems
or greatly reduced (usually custom-built and
• Systems integration is less proprietary systems that
complex and costly conduct electronic transactions
• Application development is between one or more business
less complex and costly partners) are notorious for
being user unfriendly and very
expensive. Many analysts
and organizations alike agree
that switching from EDI to an
Internet model can result in
savings of up to 95%.

Finding ROI 16

C A S E S T U D Y:

An winning intranet has many successful qualities and features.
The QAS intranet is a winner at many levels – rich with tools
and demonstrable, measured value.

QAS is a World leader in address management and data
accuracy solutions. Based on data secured from national postal
authorities and other leading sources, QAS captures, cleans
and enhances the integrity of name and address data. QAS
has a geographically diverse set of 400 employees with offices
around the globe in the U.K. (headquarters), U.S.A., Canada,
Singapore, Australia, and across Europe.

A winner of a coveted 2005 Information Management Award
for Knowledge Management, the QAS intranet, iQ, has many
winning attributes including:
1. A well defined plan
2. Robust and flexible technology
3. Rich applications
4. Measured benefits & ROI

Measured benefits
While awards are nice to receive, the QAS intranet has received
more than just kudos – it is delivering measured results and
value for the business. Some of the benefits include:
1. Measured return on investment (ROI)
2. Improved line management decision making (e.g. holiday
and purchase forms)
3. Increased sales opportunities fomented by better sales
collaboration and cross-selling
4. Improved employee communications and collaboration
5. Enhanced levels of customer service

Costs savings achieved:
1. Online Expenses – saved four person days per month.
2. Finance savings - online workflow has reduced
administrative processing time from two weeks to one
day
3. Purchase Ordering - saved four person days per month
and an ROI savings of US$20,000 per year
4. Sales Proposal Builder – streamlined proposal and sales
process saves almost US $25,000 per year
5. Intranet Use - 115% increase in usage of the intranet
(infers a yet to be measured productivity gain)

Finding ROI 17

7. COLLABORATION
B E N C H M A R K: Metcalfe’s Law states that the
number of possible cross-
Toronto-based Ipsos connections in a network grows
Reid conducted a survey as the square (exponentially) of
of organizations with the number of computers in the
Knowledge Management network increases. In short, as the
(KM) systems to measure the number of connections between
impact on process savings. computers and users increases, the
value of the network increases at an
When asked if the exponential rate. The same value
organization had measured could be ascribed to the connected
the ROI of KM processes, users of an intranet: the value of
84% said no. Of those that an organization will exponentially
had measured the ROI, increase as more connections
5% said they had with and collaboration points are made
an average (mean) ROI between intranet users.
of 41% while 7% had a
measured dollar savings of BENEFITS:
CDN$41,278. • Reduces time and space
constraints
(Source: “KM ROI”, Ideas • Support for virtual teams in
Magazine, May 2001) multiple locations
• Knowledge Management –
enhanced communications and
information sharing
• Online training (e-learning)

C A S E S T U D Y:

Toronto-based Ontario Power Generation (OPG) employs 15,000
people and operates 80 power-generating stations in Ontario. In
early 2001, OPG began implementing a new electronic document
management system (EDMS) serving its corporate group of 3,000
employees. Initial benefits will include email simplification which
will dramatically cut-down on the number of document copies –
sometimes up to 5,000 – being sent as an email attachment. While
this annual benefit has been estimated in the six-figure range, it
also aims to cut in half the amount of ‘information search time’
– sometimes up to 50-60% of an employee’s time – producing a
potential savings of CDN$45 million per year on an initial EDMS
investment of CDN$1 million.

(Source: “KM ROI”, Ideas Magazine, May 2001)

Finding ROI 18

8. TIME TO MARKET
An effective intranet enables Cadence Design Systems used
an organization to attract more to conduct regular, remote
customers and market share training sessions, two to four
by responding faster to market times per year for more than
demands. 400 of its employees. Each
session cost $260,000. For the
BENEFITS: same price, Cadence began
• Faster development of conducting the training via web
products and services conferencing – dramatically
• Reduced supply chain cycle improving the quality of skills
with suppliers, partners, training and greatly reducing
customers, etc. the huge travel expenses.
• Real-time information sharing
• Reduced inventory (Source: Placeware.com)
requirements
• Reduced working capital
requirements
• Faster invoicing and purchasing

9. CUSTOMER SERVICE
To web-enable customer service functions is to arm both internal
customer service reps and external customers with more immediate
information. Through the use of email, FAQs and service policies,
organizations can dramatically improve the information flow and reduce
the cost of customer service.

BENEFITS:
• Fewer employees required Use of KnowledgeSpace,
to service customers Arthur Andersen’s proprietary
• Availability of support and Knowledge Management intranet,
reference information has exceeded 90%, and the
• Customer and employee usage rate within the Business
access to subject matter Consulting Division is 95%.
experts via email, etc. In addition, call volume to
• Availability of 24 hour, 7 the existing global service
day per week support hotline has dropped by 50%
• More accurate and since the implemen-tation of
consistent information KnowledgeSpace – reducing
(internal information customer service costs
matches external considerably.
information)
• Centrally-managed (Source: Knowledge-Management
information repositories Intranets, Corporate Executive
Board, 2000)

Finding ROI 19

C A S E S T U D Y:

The answer to any question at Cisco Systems is “Check the
Website” (intranet or Internet). By webifying most of its customer
service functions – questions, answers and tools – through their
intranet and Internet sites, Cisco is able to resolve 70% of help
desk calls online. As a result, Cisco has accrued savings of US$86
million saved through electronic downloads and $107 million through
online configuration and documentation while increasing customer
satisfaction by 25%.

(Source: Cisco Systems)

10. HUMAN RESOURCES
While the business culture, personal compensation and the opportunity
for advancement are all critical motivators of employees, many employees
will also cite the ‘right tools to do the job’ as a prime motivating factor.
By arming employees with the right tools and technology to perform
their work, employee satisfaction and retention rates will be greater while
improving productivity and saving money.

BENEFITS:
• Higher employee retention
• Reduced training expenses
• Reduced knowledge loss and resulting competitive threat
• Improved productivity and reduced ‘downtime’ due to employee
desertions

Mitre Corp. estimates that it saves US $860,000 a year in clerical
staff overhead by using online, automated property tracking, in
lieu of physical audits, (600 clerks across the company at US$9
per hour for four weeks). Additionally, Mitre calculates that
the intranet enabled it to retain 15 teleworkers that would have
otherwise left the company, saving Mitre about US$300,000 in
recruiting costs during 1998 (about US$20,000 per employee).

(Source: Debby Young, CIO Web Business Magazine,
May 1, 2000)

Finding ROI 20

B E N C H M A R K:

To enhance existing training programs and to find cost savings
Compaq introduced online training in mid-1995. Today Compaq’s
Learning Utility is a single interface and search and retrieval
tool to access to all training courses and information resources
at the global computer company. The Utility supports both
novice and expert users and provides access to proprietary,
vendor and local content and is divided into three categories:
Licensed Courseware (from market vendors such as SmartForce
and business specific companies such as Microsoft, Cisco,
etc.), Compaq Specific Courseware (Compaq product specific
courses, etc.) and Documentation (downloads of hardware/
software manuals, sales advisory guides, etc.). In total
Compaq’s Learning Utility offers over 3000 courses and over
5000 documents.

In 2000, total learning downloads (and courses taken) equaled
342,412 with the average download cost reduced from $9.59 in
1999 to $7.78 in 2000. Excluding travel costs that would have
been saved by employees having to previously travel to attend
training, the Utility achieved total annual savings surpassing
US$13 million in 2000.

(Source: Jim Melanson, Director, Compaq,
“Workforce Planning & e-Learning”, February 28, 2001)

C A S E S T U D Y:

The government of Alberta’s corporate intranet, AGENT, serves
24 government departments and 24,000 employees. In August of
2000, AGENT began to rollout a number of HR self-service tools
for employees as part of a three year plan. Online self-service
includes accessing, updating and managing personal information
for compensation, benefits, absence tracking, personal contact
information (including emergency contacts), and time benefits
including flextime. Planned tools to be phased in include expense
claims, updating information on dependents, online training, full
benefit selection and full time tracking. AGENT’s self-service
program has a three-year budget of CDN$4.8 million with a
budgeted return on investment of CDN$1.3 million per year.

(Source: Marsha Capell, IMGIS, Government of Alberta,
“Developing an Eight Stage Approach to Implementing
Employee Self-Service “, June 27, 2001)

Finding ROI 21

A BALANCE

While precisely measuring the ROI of an intranet’s far-reaching benefits
would be difficult for even the best accountants and auditors, measuring
just a few of the surface benefits can sway even miserly CFOs to open
the coffers. As demonstrated by the many examples, benchmarks and
case studies highlighted in this white paper, many successful intranet
organizations do achieve and measure significant ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ intranet
ROI. This ROI is often more than enough to justify the intranet or portal’s
existence and frequently achieves a higher level of appreciation as a value
added, mission-critical business necessity.

Generating significant return on investment is not reserved solely for
large organizations; small and medium-sized organizations also extract
measured value from their intranets and portals. For example, the
American Medical Association in Chicago has only 1,400 employees, yet
has deployed 50 to 60 intranet applications. Despite its small size, the
AMA estimates that the return on investment for its HR self-service tools
had hit 40% by early 1999. (Source: Intranet Leap Of Faith, CIO.com, May
1999)

Finding ROI 22

INTRANET 2.0
Like Web 2.0, Intranet 2.0 represents the evolving collection of social
media tools that are revolutionizing the intranet, and the way organizations
and employees connect and collaborate. Specifically, Intranet 2.0 tools
like blogs, wikis and social networking sites promote collaboration, people
connection, and ongoing dialogues that augment, but not replace the
traditional top-down communications model.

Evolving to Intranet 2.0

Intranet 1.0 Intranet 2.0
Corporate news Submit News
Executives speech Executive blog
Taxonomy Folksonomy
Quick poll Discussion forums
Annual employee broadcast Regular podcast
CMS Wikis
Directories (A-Z) Tagging
Sticky content RSS

C A S E S T U D Y:

T. Rowe Price adds 1,500 workers to work in its call center for each
tax season (for approximately 3 months). Training these workers is
large, involved exercise, but imperfect.

Price’s corporate trainers got smart and transferred the entire train-
ing program to a wiki. Price encouraged new employees to take
notes during the sessions and then add notes, comments and rec-
ommendations to the wiki. As a result, the company estimates that it
saves one to two minutes per call at $20 per minute (the net result is
in the millions of dollars).

Finding ROI 23

C A S E S T U D Y:

Sabre, the company that runs most of the world’s airline flight
reservation systems among many other systems, is an impressive
example of the power of Intranet 2.0. With about 9,000 employees,
they are a medium-sized company that have embraced Intranet 2.0
with spectacular results. Building from scratch, Sabre launched their
own intranet social networking site for employees (built on Ruby on
Rails) called SabreTown.

SabreTown has all the features of most social networking sites:
• Employee profiles with lots of details
• Shared photos
• Blogs
• User commenting
• Network connections & feeds
• Enterprise question & answer functionality

On Sabre Town, users can post a question to the entire organization,
and the site’s inference or relevance engine will automatically send
the question to the 15 most relevant employees (based on what
they’ve entered in their profile, blog postings and other Q&As that
have been previously posted). The results have been spectacular:
60% of questions are answered within one hour; each question
receives an average of 9 responses. The system has already led to
more than $500,000 in immediate, direct savings for the company,
with much greater benefits not yet measured.

SabreTown’s success is summarized in one spectacular metric: 65%
of all Sabre employees became active SabreTown members in the
first 3 months! More than 90% of employees are active today.

Forrester estimates the enterprise Web 2.0 (Intranet 2.0) collaboration
market will hit $1.8 billion by 2013.

According to Forrester, social networking tools and internal wikis will
have the greatest impact on workplace collaboration (see Forrester
Projects Which Enterprise Web 2.0 Collaboration Technologies Will Grow,
Which Will Decline). Technologies such as forums and RSS have a future
in the enterprise but are currently underused, while podcasts have a
limited future as an enterprise tool to increase productivity and enhance
collaboration.

Whether you’re ready or not, your organization can no longer ignore
Intranet 2.0. Employees are reading blogs on the web, contributing to
wikis, listening to podcasts, and networking via Facebook, MySpace,
Orkut, or others. Moreover, they’re probably talking about your
organization, and you’re not part of the conversation.
Finding ROI 24

Before they implemented their own employee social networking site,
MyBT, BT (British Telecom) discovered that 4,000 employees had
voluntarily joined a BT Facebook community in their own time. Employees
were connecting online, in their own time, talking about BT, and BT wasn’t
part of the conversation.

“Many believe that trying to stop social media tools seeping onto intranets
is a futile activity anyway, so it is better to introduce them on your terms

C A S E S T U D Y:

BlueShirt Nation (BSN) is a secure and private social networking site
for more than 100,000 Best Buy employees. Established by Best
Buy as a means of engaging employees for ideas for innovation
and improving the business, the online community encourages
discussion about whatever they want to talk about (e.g. pets, sports,
etc.).

“In general, they talk about how to make Best Buy a better place,”
says founder and sponsor Gary Koelling. “Improve on the things we
don’t do well, share the things that we do do well, talk about and
express the culture that we have, talk about customers- both good
and bad.”

Some control was sacrificed to help increase the engagement which
among other things encouraged employees to participate in a video
contest that promoted their 401k retirement campaign. Employees
were encouraged to upload their own videos to the site as part of the
contest (see a sample at Best Buy Using Social Media for Employee
Engagement). Out of 140,000 Best Buy employees (almost all
young), BSN helped increase the number of employees signing up
for 401(k) accounts by 30%, and no doubt has contributed to a
significant increase in employee retention in a tight staffing market.

in a managed way,” says BT’s social media chief Richard Dennison, who
quite candidly shares this though and BT’s work on his blog Inside out.

While BT’s management was reluctant to introduce these tools to
employees, they really had little choice: employees were already using
them and BT was in danger of being left out, and left behind. Adds
Dennison: “If you don’t think about what value you can deliver in an
enterprise 2.0 environment, you are going to become irrelevant!!”

Intranet 2.0 has indeed exploded at BT. In addition to social networking,
BT employees blog, podcast, collaborate in discussion forums, and they
wiki too. In fact, the wikis are so popular and successful that there are
Finding ROI 25

more than 750,000 employee wikis – and the vast, vast majority of them
are dedicated to business topics that help BT compete in the global
workplace.

According to Prescient Digital Media’s study on Intranet 2.0 (with more
than 430 participating), these numbers are very average indeed (though
much, much lower in medium size, and small organizations) and echoed
by many recent studies: most organizations have not introduced Intranet
2.0 tools, but want to.

C A S E S T U D Y:

At Placemaking, the entire intranet is built on a wiki platform
(Intranet case study: Intrawest Placemaking). A Placemaking project
manager using the intranet (wiki) created a page about a method of
finishing concrete floors that creates an appearance better than tile
at a substantially lower cost – saving the company $500,000 and
reducing the project timeline.

Other project managers in Florida and Nevada posted comments
to the page, asking further questions and adding comments. In
response, Hartigan posted photos of the finished job and addressed
their comments. The other construction managers planned on using
this valuable knowledge in future projects, potentially saving the
company millions of dollars.

Many, many others of course have blazed that trail and so while some
organizations struggle with the ‘how’, IT and communications managers
need only look to the trailblazers like BT, IBM, and many others that have
shared their successes.

RECOMMENDATIONS FOR ADOPTION:

Adopting an intranet wiki or blog however should not be done without
the requisite planning and change management. Here are a number of
suggestions for proceeding:

1. Listen - Understand and monitor the social web to see what is
being said about you, and ask your customers / employees what
they want.
2. Monitor - Ensure you’re aware of which community websites (e.g.
YouTube) your audience and competitors are using
3. Benchmark - Understand the ingredients of a good blog, wiki or
podcast; watch and cherry-pick from the leaders
4. Leadership – Senior management must set the tone; your
executives must be leading the dialogue and controlling the
message

Finding ROI 26

5. Plan - Planning is an essential requisite for success; develop a
plan that is based on a thorough assessment and contains key
performance indicators (KPIs)
6. Governance – very tool needs an owner and a policy (terms of use)
7. Technology - choose your vendors carefully based on business
requirements & needs
8. Refresh – keep your content and tools relevant and fresh, and
ensure they cross-promote your latest products and services
9. Measure - Document the link between social media and the
business and develop a set of performance metrics with baselines
that are regularly measured
10. Engage – gather constant feedback and act quickly on necessary
changes

Finally, consider an Intranet 2.0 undertaking as “evolution not revolution”
– there’s no need to solve the world on your first attempt; test and pilot
solutions and enhance as necessary before trying to conquer the world.

For the latest case studies and trends in Intranet 2.0, please visit: http://
intranetblog.blogware.com/blog/Intranet20

Finding ROI 27

ENTERPRISE INFORMATION PORTALS
A portal is a door or gateway of importance. Your custom-built or content
management driven intranet home page may be a portal. However,
the enterprise portal solution (sometimes referred to as the Enterprise
Information Portal (EIP)) is a multifaceted piece of software that has
some distinguishing features from an average intranet home page. The
enterprise intranet portal solution has three distinguishing characteristics:
• advanced user personalization capabilities;
• security (authorization and authentication); and,
• enterprise application integration (EAI, the software and processes
that link together or integrate an organizations many applications
(e.g. ERP, CRM, HR applications).
Silver bullets that solve all your
problems are rare in life; and nearly
non-existent in the intranet world. Far While many organizations
from being a silver bullet, enterprise are hoping for a ‘silver
intranet portals are extraordinarily and bullet’ solution to their
exceedingly powerful, but are also intranet challenges,
complex, pricey and pose many, many patience and caution is
challenges for large organizations. advised. Hundreds of
There are few enterprise applications intranet portal solutions
that, when implemented properly are proliferate the market
more complex than the enterprise with few leaders and
intranet portal. Enterprise resource few (if any) products
planning (ERP), business intelligence capable of delivering the
(BI), and customer relationship appropriate solution for
management (CRM) are all complex all of an organization’s
and costly endeavors, but the optimal requirements. Caveat
enterprise intranet portal (EIP) has a emptor warns the
bigger scale and scope that involves Gartner Group, “extreme
and engages all employees and can due diligence should be
(should) include composite application performed before buying
integration of all of the above. a portal product.”

PORTAL APPLICATIONS
Now, if those concepts are not complex enough to understand for non-
techies, the typical EIP delivers a lot more bells and whistles than the
above distinguishing characteristics. Some solutions like the powerful
Oracle Portal or IBM WebSphere Portal come with hundreds of portlets,
many, many bundled applications, and a bevy of plug-in suites and
additional solutions with some big and complex tools unto their own
including:
• Search
• Content management
• Document management
• Records management
• Digital asset management
• Business process management

Finding ROI 28

• Web 2.0 tools (blogs, wikis, etc.)
• Collaboration suites (e.g. team pages)
• Analytics and reporting
• Development platforms, tookits and ‘factories’

Although the EIP solution may sound ideal, rarely does a ‘silver bullet’
solution exist. These and other powerful enterprise portal products from
Sun, Vignette, SAP, and the ubiquitous Microsoft SharePoint (MOSS
2007), have massive horse-power capable of solving complicated
business requirements. The catch: it comes at a price, and an opportunity
cost.
For starters, most of the above functionality, often referred to as utility
applications, are ‘thin’ versions of stand-alone products. The robustness
of most portal search engines and
content management systems
The Plumtree-powered (CMS), for example, are far less
corporate portal at Ford, than the individual versions. Often,
my.ford.com, is expected to many organizations don’t use the
deliver significant savings on search engines that come with
many fronts by organizing a portal, they plug in Google,
“scattered intranet sites into Autonomy or Endeca which are
a framework that everybody almost always far more powerful
can use, anywhere, and than their portal brethren.
broadens the audience for
applications previously limited PORTAL AND CMS
to specialists...” For example,
In addition to offering bundled
Ford estimates that online
applications like those listed
training delivered via the portal
above, many of the portal vendors
will drive down training costs
sell separate content management
to an average of $.21 per class,
systems – and vice versa. A
down from $300-$2,500 per
traditional CMS vendor, Vignette
class –producing millions in
has also become a leading
annual savings.
portal vendor. CMS vendors
Day, Interwoven (now part of
(Source: Plumtree Software,
Autonomy), and others also have
“The Plumtree Corporate
portals.
Portal at Ford Motor Company)
While the CMS vendors roll-out
portal products, the portal vendors
now sell content management
systems – not only included in the portal solution, but also as separate
products. Oracle not only has a portal product, Oracle Portal, but a
2nd portal product called WebCenter (which integrated components of
a former portal solution from BEA, called AquaLogic), and it sells two
different CMS package including the CMS formerly known as Stellent.
IBM Websphere Portal has different CMS options, but also recently
bought and now sells FileNet which has separate CMS and document
management products. To complicate things further, FileNet OEMs the
Day content management system, and IBM and Interwoven have a long

Finding ROI 29

standing partnership that allows for
easy integration of the TeamSite CMS ROI PORTAL EXAMPLE
into WebSphere portal (Interwoven is
now owned by Autonomy). It is indeed a “WebSphere Portal
confusing marketplace. and Portlet Factory are
helping us compete
“The distinction between portal and by reducing the cost
CMS is not that meaningful… users of delivering value-
shouldn’t have to buy separate added services both to
products,” says portal analyst Matthew clients and a dispersed
Brown of Forrester Research. “If I’m workforce.
a user, I should be able to construct a Personalized portal views
page and I should be able to run static and dashboards have
content or incorporate a portlet or improved collaboration
gadget. There is so much that overlaps with clients, increased
between the two.” our productivity and
But there’s a good reason to have contributed to an
separate stand-alone products – for outstanding satisfaction
some organizations – while others rate. An accounts
require an integrated solution. “Portals payable application
and CMSs still peacefully coexist,” developed for our portal
adds Brown, who intimates the need for alone has saved
separate products, all the while having UNICCO nearly $140,000
the option for integrated solutions. It in 2006 by eliminating
all depends on the requirements of the paper invoice searches,”
buyer. said William Jenkins,
senior director of
Microsoft is leading the challenge for
information technology
a single, integrated solution. No longer
for UNICCO Service
does MS offer a separate CMS and
(Source: IBM)
portal product, the new SharePoint
Server 2007 combines the two.
Driving the growth in the EIP market is the hunt for ROI. While a portal
solution can deliver many benefits, Prescient Digital Media categories
portal ROI into into seven principal areas:
1. Competitive/market advantage
2. Increased employee productivity
3. Increased effectiveness
4. Decreased cost of information
5. Increased collaboration
6. Universal access to enterprise resources
7. Unified, dynamic view of enterprise data and information
If properly executed, the benefits of an EIP are many. From a user
perspective, it provides more intuitive and personalized, single source
access to corporate information and tools, thereby creating a more
relevant and productive user experience. For IT, the portal provides
a single view of an organization’s platforms and systems with built-in
integration tools that make their jobs easier. However, Prescient warns
that there are two principal challenges that are not easily overcome:

Finding ROI 30

1. Ensuring organizational processes sync with the portal functionality
(or vice versa)
2. Integrating multiple technologies into a portal can be extremely
complex, time-consuming, and expensive
Driving the growth in the EIP market is the hunt for ROI. While a portal
solution can deliver many benefits, Prescient Digital Media categories
portal ROI into into seven principal areas:
1. Competitive/market advantage
2. Increased employee productivity
3. Increased effectiveness
4. Decreased cost of information
5. Increased collaboration
6. Universal access to enterprise resources
7. Unified, dynamic view of enterprise data and information

The AquaLogic (formerly called
Plumtree) powered corporate portal
at Ford, my.ford.com, is expected to
deliver significant savings on many
fronts by organizing “scattered intranet
sites into a framework that everybody
can use, anywhere, and broadens the
audience for applications previously
limited to specialists...”

For example, Ford estimates that
online training delivered via the portal will drive down training costs to an
average of $21 per class, down from $300 - $2,500 per class – producing
millions in annual savings.

(Source: Plumtree Software, “The Plumtree Corporate
Portal at Ford Motor Company)

To protect and extend its leadership position in a highly volatile market,
Plumtree (now a part of Oracle by way of BEA) was quite aggressive
in measuring and touting the ROI potential of implementing a portal
solution. In its paper entitled, “A Framework For Assessing the Return
on Investment Potential for a Corporate Portal Deployment,” Plumtree
estimated the possible one-year ROI of a full portal deployment at a
hypothetical 5,000-person company at US$3.2 million (under ideal
circumstances). However, Plumtree is realistic in their approach and
cautions that “quantifying costs and benefits is a necessary exercise, but
not a science. Because our example was so generic, this number itself is
not meaningful, but the process for calculating that number is. A host of
variables in each business will produce different results.”

For more on portal solutions and EIP, please visit: http://intranetblog.
blogware.com/blog/Portal
Finding ROI 31

KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT (KM)
Companies experience a variety of
challenges in managing and recouping GLOSSARY
the benefits from the knowledge of their
employees. KNOWLEDGE
MANAGEMENT (KM)
Individuals throughout the organization is the way and means
are acquiring and creating enormous that organizations create,
volumes of valuable information in the store and access (reuse)
marketplace, the company, and best knowledge to accomplish
practices in the course of their work enterprise goals.
every day. Little of this vital information
is being converted into an organizational KM requires:
knowledge asset, used for training and
reference, or leveraged to increase the • Organizational
organizational value and improve the processes and rules
execution of its business strategy. (taxonomy)
• Innovative and
Middle managers spend more than participatory individuals
a quarter of their time searching for • The appropriate
information necessary to their jobs, and technology to support
when they do find it, it is often wrong, knowledge sharing
according to results of an Accenture
study (“Managers Say the Majority of
Information Obtained for Their Work Is Useless”, January 2007).

The proliferation of different information sources within organizations
was revealed by the survey as the most important reason why managing
information is proving difficult.

Among the key findings:

 WASTED TIME:
 Managers spend up to two hours a day searching for
information
 42% said they accidentally use the wrong information at
least once a week
 57% of respondents said that having to go to numerous
sources to compile information is a difficult aspect of
managing information for their jobs

 NO VALUE:
 More than 50% of the information managers obtain has no
value to them
 53% said that less than half of the information they receive is
valuable

 POOR MANAGEMENT:
 Only half of all managers believe their companies do a good
Finding ROI 32

job in governing information distribution or have established
adequate processes
 59% said that as a consequence of poor information
distribution, they miss information that might be valuable to
their jobs almost every day

Effective KM should help a company or organization do one or more of the
following:

1. Foster innovation by encouraging the free flow of ideas
2. Improve customer service by improving customer response time
3. Boost revenues by getting products and services to market faster
4. Enhance employee retention rates by recognizing and rewarding
employees who share knowledge
5. Streamline operations and reduce costs by eliminating redundant
or unnecessary processes

Although it is difficult to measure
ServiceWare is a leading exactly, there is a significant cost
provider of Web-based associated with interrupting peers and
knowledge management taking them away from productive
solutions for customer work. Studies of help desk operations
service and support. report it costs about $15 - $20 on
average to provide help and guidance
ServiceWare estimates that by telephone, and about $5 to do it by
an average call center of email.
110 agents could reduce
costs by US$2 million Informal learning conducted person-
over a three year period to-person will continue to be a key
– representing a 20% role in an organization. However, many
cost savings – using the organizations are striving to reduce this
company’s web-based KM person-to-person reliance by 25% or
system to help improve more through online support.
customer service.
The need to sell the KM concept to
(Source: The Insider’s employees can be a challenge. After
Guide To Knowledge all, in many cases employees are being
Management, asked to surrender their knowledge and
Tom Tobin, January 2003) experience – the very traits that make
them valuable as individuals.

The best KM efforts are as transparent to employees’ workflow as
possible. Ideally, participating in a KM program should be its own reward.
If KM doesn’t make life easier for employees, it will fail.

While technology can support KM, it’s not the starting point for a
successful KM program. KM decisions and programs must be based
on people (employees), and grounded in the knowledge they hold for
achieving business objectives. The ‘how’ (technology) should only be used
to support a knowledge management program, not drive it.
Finding ROI 33

B E N C H M A R K:

Ameriking is the largest owner-
operator of Burger King restaurants in
the United States. Always seeking to
foster innovation and continually look
for ways to improve performance,
Ameriking implemented the Plumtree
corporate portal to connect 250 core
managers in 12 states – and is being
extended to all 376 restaurants in the
chain.

In the Ameriking portal, Akinet, management are provided with a
forum to share ideas and experience for the purpose of identifying a
set of internal best practices.

According to independent research firm Delphi Group, Ameriking’s
US$411,000 portal investment could return a value of 355 percent
over three years (or $1,025,000).

Delphi categorizes the benefits derived from the portal into four
major areas:

Improved information access: $783,750
- Over 70,000 documents are now available to field
management saving support staff 60 minutes per week by
using the portal
Decreased print & distribution costs: $343,759
- 80% of previously printed accounting reports are now
available in AKinet saving $20k per month
Centralized purchasing savings: $317,760
- Greater volume discounts result from aggregated purchases;
Automated accounting processes increase savings
Decreased communication costs: $64,800
- Field managers no longer place 3 calls to process new
employee forms
- 30% reduction in field staff phone and fax expenses

Source: A Delphi Group White Paper,
Ameriking’s Akinet, March 2002

KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT– PR FIRM EXAMPLE

Ketchum, one of the world’s largest public relations firms, offers
professional services across six practices areas through 1,500 employees
in 23 offices around the world.
Finding ROI 34

A Meta Group White Paper describes myKGN (my Ketchum Global
Network), as a next-generation intranet and extranet- shared by employees,
partners and clients worldwide.

To improve teamwork and sharing, Ketchum developed secure eRooms,
to help teams work together on projects to ensure the creation of timely,
trusted content. Rather than trading document revisions in an endless email
loop, users now review and revise documents in real time.

Before myKGN, most employees would labor for several hours attempting
to locate expertise. Now, the average is 30 minutes. This
helps Ketchum Account Reps in preparing complex RFPs and increases
their chance of winning business.

This Knowledge Management focus extends further by providing Ketchum
Account Reps with:

• News wire subscriptions to keep account reps up-to-date on client
activities.
• A document library enabling employees to perform full-text searches
ranging from new business pitches, to past client deliverables, to press
releases.

C A S E S T U D Y:

Halliburton is one of the world’s largest providers of products
and services to the oil and gas industries and winner of the 2003
Extended Enterprise Innovator Award for developing an extensive
collaborative portal that relies on integrated ERP functions to serve
customers, suppliers and employees.

In its first year, the portal influenced $120 million in sales, according
to customer surveys; improved corporate efficiencies to the tune of
about $500,000 by enabling better access to technical documents;
and led to reduced payment cycles.

(Source: Beth Schultz,
Network World,
February 17, 2003)

KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT– LAW FIRM EXAMPLE

When Pittsburgh law firm Eckert Seamans Cherin & Mellott wanted to
go national without opening any additional offices, the 44-year-old firm’s
executives needed two things: a network of partners and a network
connecting them. The firm was planning to serve as a national co-
coordinator for thousands of product-liability claims against a major client.
But new ideas were needed when it was deemed impossible to set up a
physical presence in 50 states, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands.
Finding ROI 35

Dozens of local law firms were recruited to act as ‘local counsel’ on behalf
of Eckert Seamans to handle claims in their own states. The network
connecting them all is the Eckert Seamans extranet, which contains all
related documents, including briefs, transcripts, interviews, research,
medical and scientific information, and correspondence.
This provides clients with a consistent nationwide defense by making sure
that all the lawyers are literally on the same page. In addition, it saves time
and money by providing those geographically dispersed partners with
research to strengthen the cases in their states. And the extranet lets the
firm’s 215 lawyers co-ordinate cases like never before.

The system didn’t come cheap. It is estimated that Eckert Seamans has
invested US $1.3 million so far, including construction costs to create a
separate technology centre.

Eckert Seamans is concerned about security breaches – and not just
from hackers. The firm must protect against possible security breaches
involving the very partners for whom it established the intranet – those
local-counsel firms. They are working together for now, but they are still
competitors relying on a combination of firewalls, multiple passwords,
and encryption to make sure those faraway lawyers get access only to the
appropriate cases and only for the length of their contracts.

B E N C H M A R K:

Software producer Hyperion built an extensive intranet called
GlobalSource in 1996. But by 2002, the company was primed to
create an enterprise portal specifically for Hyperion’s sales and
marketing staff.

As traveling sales people have limited time in their hotel rooms at
night, it was important to spare them the hassles of switching from
database to database, application to application. The new portal
called My Global Source, was put together with multiple portal
vendors.

Currently, 2,000 Hyperion employees use the enterprise portal,
and the company is in the process of adding a version for outside
distributors. And that opens new issues – primarily security-related.

(Source: Darwin Magazine, Executive Guides,
Knowledge Management www.darwinmag.com, 2003)

Finding ROI 36

WEB CONTENT G L O S S A R Y:
MANAGEMENT (WCM)
WEB CONTENT
At the risk of oversimplifying, content MANAGEMENT (WCM)
management is the process by which is sometimes referred
content is created, managed, and to as a subset of KM.
published to your website or portal. WCM is the process by
Specifically, advanced content which content is created,
management uses a technology solution managed, and published
(software) to simplify and speed the web to your website or portal.
content publishing and management
process. Advanced content
management uses a
In the beginning, all HTML and web technology solution
content was hard-coded by a techie. (software) to simplify
Today, content owners who don’t know and speed the web
a single line of code skillfully publish live content publishing and
to the intranet, in minutes. Publishing management process.
that once took hours, can take seconds
with the right rules and templates.

Not surprisingly, an intranet study
published by Melcrum Research showed that the number one issue facing
intranet managers is content management. The number three issue was
content overload.

Sales of
web content
management
software was
estimated to
reach nearly US$1
billion by 2010,
and will grow at
an annual rate of
15% through 2012
(representing 25%
(Source: “Survey data: Management of the intranet and
of the total ECM
issues companies face” – Melcrum Research Report, market).
Managing and Developing Intranets for Business Value,)

Of course, one of the biggest drivers behind content management is the
push for efficiency and cost savings. Specific drivers and principles of
content management include:

Finding ROI 37

• Create and publish content in a timely manner
• Organize content to support work processes
• Delineate roles and responsibilities for managing content
• Develop policies to guide content processes
• Create personalized ‘workspaces’
• Use one tool to publish information across different sites
• Reduce site creation, maintenance, and deployment costs
• Reduce the cost of publishing content

The last point, ‘reduce the cost’, is perhaps the most important driver,
and certainly the most saleable one if you’re attempting to justify an
investment in an expensive content management solution.

C A S E S T U D Y:

MERANT has calculated the estimated savings of implementing its
CMS tool, called PVCS Content Manager, at a typical 2,500-person
company. Factoring in estimates for content creation (headcount),
maintenance, deployment (publishing), and enhancement costs,
MERANT estimates the annual savings at US$2.1 million.

MERANT is quick to point out, however, that in addition to the
traditional hard cost savings there are “numerous” soft benefits,
which are more difficult to measure for ROI, but perhaps more
valuable in the long run.

(Source: MERANT, “Assessing ROI for Content Management
Systems”, 2001)

Content management ROI benefits include:
• Print/paper savings
• Mail/delivery savings
• Publishing time savings
• Employee productivity savings
• Reduced IT reliance
• Reduced meetings/sign-off/preparation
• Reduced site development/maintenance

There are scores of content management system (CMS) vendors from the
Cadillac vendors such as Interwoven (Autonomy), Vignette, and Oracle, to
more reasonably priced solutions from Red Dot and The Level.

Prescient Digital Media worked with one CMS vendor, Anzer IT (formerly
TiCORP) to analyze and estimate the potential ROI value of implementing
its PowerCentral content management platform in a typical work
environment. To understand the cost breakdown of publishing online, a
typical scenario of publishing five static HTML pages is documented with
cost estimates below.
Finding ROI 38

Under the traditional publishing
model, assuming an average Traditional HTML publishing often
content/communications requires a technical programmer
manager costs approximately to hard-code each HTML page by
$45 per hour ($50,000 per scratch – often at a rate of one hour
year, with $25,000 in support/ per HTML page. By empowering
administrative costs), and content owners to publish and
a technical manager costs manage their own content, many
approximately $69 per hour organizations are removing or
($65,000 per year, with $32,500 retasking expensive technical
in support/administrative support and programming from the
costs), the average cost to process – saving tens-of-thousands
publish five pages will cost of dollars per year, or possibly more.
approximately $500 (required
time multiplied by hourly costs).

Time/Cost Required by Content/Communications Manager –
TRADITIONAL PUBLISHING:

TRADITIONAL PUBLISHING TIME COST ($)
(min) ($45/hr)

Preparation/instructions 30 22.50
Meetings/discussion 20 15.00
Review changes 20 15.00
Alterations and ensuing discussion 10 7.50
Review changes and approve 10 7.50
Ensure successful upload 10 7.50

TOTAL TIME/COST 100 $75

Time/Cost Required by Content/Communications Manager –
CONTENT MANAGEMENT PUBLISHING:

TIME COST ($)
CMS PUBLISHING* (min) ($45/hr)

Application open and log-in 5 3.75
Copy, paste and format text 5 3.75
Review and edit 5 3.75
Approve and post live 5 3.75

TOTAL TIME/COST 25 $18.75

*Using the TiCORP PowerCentral product, requiring no technical support

Finding ROI 39

Time/Cost Required by Programmer/Technical Manager
TRADITIONAL PUBLISHING:

TIME COST ($)
TRADITIONAL PUBLISHING (min) ($65/hr)

Meetings/discussion 30 32.50
Program content (1 hour per page) 300 325.00
Additional revisions 50 54.17
Upload to site 15 16.25

TOTAL TIME/COST 405 $438.75

Time/Cost Required by Programmer/Technical Manager
CONTENT MANAGEMENT PUBLISHING:

TIME COST ($)
CMS PUBLISHING* (min) ($65/hr)

Application open and log-in 0 0
Copy, paste and format text 0 0
Review and edit 0 0
Approve and post live 0 0
Ensure successful upload 0 0

TOTAL TIME/COST 0 $0

*Using the TiCORP PowerCentral product, requiring no technical support

Using the PowerCentral CMS, the time required to publish five pages of
static content drops dramatically – the programmer/ technical manager
is eliminated from the process as the content manager can now publish
directly to the site. As a result, the cost of publishing five pages drops
from approximately $500 to approximately $19 – an impressive savings of
96%.

If the same estimates hold true for the standard CMS (not necessarily the
case), a $100,000 content management solution (costs vary depending on
the solution) would realize a 100% ROI after approximately 1000 pages, or
20 weeks in an organization that publishes 10 pages per business day.

Finding ROI 40

It goes without saying that there are many other factors that would affect
the ROI (for example, rarely would it take 5 minutes to cut and paste copy
into a simple template – seconds would suffice) – from training costs
to support costs (either could increase or decrease). Nonetheless, the
above example and accompanying tables provide a quick snapshot of the
potential value an effective CMS can deliver if planned and implemented
properly.

C A S E S T U D Y:

Before implementing its CMS, investment bank Credit Suisse First
Boston (CSFB) had five methods of publishing content to distribution
servers and three methods for intranet applications. Using a
customized version of Interwoven’s OpenDeploy, CSFB reduced
network utilization costs 88% in one year. CSFB uses the CMS to
publish press releases, research reports, white papers and other
materials to multiple servers on different platforms.

(Source: Eugene Grygo, InfoWorld)

For more on WCM, ECM, and CMS solutions, visit: http://intranetblog.
blogware.com/blog/ContentManagementCMS

Finding ROI 41

HUMAN By early 2000, Mitre Corp. had
RESOURCES realized US$16.6million in hard
cost savings since deploying
its intranet in 1996. Savings
Thoughtful implementation of include: US$5.6 million in HR and
HR self-service/portal solutions administration, US$2.9 million in
can lead to hard-dollar cost IS management, US$3.6 million in
savings and soft, employee financial operations, US$2 million
productivity savings. in technical operations and US$2.6
million in miscellaneous savings.
A comprehensive ROI study In total, a US$7.2 million intranet
that also incorporates the investment has returned US$62.1
ability to turn soft benefits into million in reduced operating costs
tangible savings may capture and improved productivity.
management’s commitment
to a HR self-service/portal (Source: Debby Young, CIO Web
implementation because these Business Magazine,
services can lead to an actual May 1, 2000)
increase in the bottom line, not
just cost savings.

Organizational Diagnostics is a management-consulting firm in California
specializing in research in high-tech Silicon Valley companies. Over
the past decade, it has conducted research on the effect of employee
satisfaction on employee retention.

They conclude that for every 2% increase in employee satisfaction, there
is a 1% increase in employee retention. Put another way, to the extent that
you satisfy your staff with the resources and services they need, you can
reduce employee replacement costs. (The ABCs of Return on Investment,
PeopleSoft White Paper, June 2001)

As well, as employees stay on longer, their productivity rises and training
costs fall. The combination of a higher employee job satisfaction rating,
along with improved knowledge and experience, leads to better customer
service.

C A S E S T U D Y:

In January 2001, PeopleSoft began to deploy its own software, PeopleSoft 8
Human Resources Management, for HR, benefits administration, payroll, job
postings and other self-service tools for 10,000 users in 26 countries. With
self-service tools requiring no phone calls, fax or mail to complete tasks,
employees are more productive and red-tape paper trails have virtually been
eliminated. Projected over a 5-year period, PeopleSoft hopes to realize an
ROI of 415%, or more than US$8 million, with the initial investment being
recouped within 1.5 years.

(Source: PeopleSoft, “The ABCs of Return on Investment,” June 2001)

Finding ROI 42

The results show that employees who were highly satisfied with their
intranet or corporate portal also had a high level of job satisfaction.
Conversely, those who were very dissatisfied with their intranet or
corporate portals were much more likely to be dissatisfied with their
jobs. Other research has shown that effective internal communications
– often the responsibility of HR – is a driver of job satisfaction. Since
the portal functions as an online communications tool, it naturally flows
that a significant correlation between the effective portal and higher job
satisfaction would exist.

An Atlanta IT-consulting firm considers it critical to build long- term
commitments with both employees and customers. To help measure
the performance of the organization, Extreme Logic encourages both
employees and customers to take the annual employee survey on the
combined intranet-extranet.

This system has not directly affected revenues, which topped
$30 million last year. But it has impacted the company’s own showing
in two top-priority areas: retaining star performers and nurturing all
employees. When workers leave − whether they’re hired away by
competitors or fired for poor performance −
the company spends as much as three times an employee’s annual salary
to find and train a replacement. Getting quick online feedback directly
from customers lets Extreme Logic reward its stars and provide specific
improvement goals for everyone else.

The approach seems to work. Mike Williams, who oversees human
resources, told Inc, The Magazine for Growing Companies, that the
company’s turnover rate is 5% to 10% lower than the IT industry
standard. In addition, according to an internal study, since the company
added the performance-evaluation feature to its intranet 18 months ago,
about 80% of its employees and managers feel that they were working
toward the same goals, compared with 52% before the new intranet.

INTRANET – STAFFING AGENCY EXAMPLE
For TemPositions, making connections quickly is what counts. The
company, one of 350 temporary-staffing agencies in New York City,
has begun bidding against the big boys – including $4.1-billion Kelly
Services − for major contracts. To compete against the industry giants,
TemPositions focuses on what CEO and President James Essey calls
its core strength: delivering the perfect worker faster. And to do that,
TemPositions relies on an intranet that, much like a dating service,
instantly matches customer requests with the best available contract
employees.

If, for instance, a client company needs a registered nurse with pediatric
experience, the TemPositions intranet automatically emails the job offer
to the best-qualified candidates. The system excludes temps who are
already on assignments or unavailable because of vacation or illness.
When contractors accept contracts, the intranet automatically emails them
Finding ROI 43

C A S E S T U D Y:

TransAlta Energy and its subsidiaries are in the business of electric
and thermal energy supply, energy marketing and energy services in
Canada, the United States, Mexico and Australia.

A research firm called Gartner Consulting, reported that TransAlta
Corp. achieved a 102 per cent rate of return by implementing SAP’s
human resources module.

The study showed TransAlta would achieve a 10-year savings of
$31-million. Gartner calculated the ROI by evaluating explicit cost-
savings or revenue-enhancing benefits associated with related
business processes such as time management and organizational
management.

(Source: Computing Canada, Volume 29, Issue 11,
June 6, 2003, www.itbusiness.ca)

a link to their own personal job bank site, where they find assignment
sheets with dates, prices, a map, and supervisor contact information.
When temps reject offers or don’t respond, the intranet solicits the next
person in line. Corporate customers can even make their own temp
requests online.

Essey told Inc (www.inc.com) the do-it-yourself convenience “cements us
to the customer in a big way because once they get into the system and
see all the information there, they’re less likely to go to a competitor.”

That’s a far cry from the traditional temp-placement process, which
typically requires hours of telephone tag. (Customers call the agency
with a personnel request, and then agency employees dig through
paper files, call candidates, and wait for return calls.) The streamlined
process, in turn, has allowed the 40-year-old company to go after large,
long-term contracts it couldn’t even have considered before. At the
time, TemPositions was competing for a contract to supply New York
City schools with more than 1,000 temps in a variety of fields, including
curriculum, course development and counseling. “We couldn’t bid on it if
we didn’t have these tools,” said Essey. “We’d need enough employees to
fill a football-field-size call center.”

TemPositions, which had about $30 million in revenues in 2001, spent
$250,000 building its intranet in 1998, primarily on Web design and for
the salaries of a chief information officer, a programmer, and a technology
troubleshooter. Essey expects the intranet to reduce the company’s head
count – eliminating, for instance, the need for data-entry staffers. Essey
said those savings are well worth the investment.

Finding ROI 44

EXTRANET – HEALTH INDUSTRY EXAMPLE

Speed was the issue at Eminent Research Systems, in Minneapolis, where
clogged procedural arteries were stunting the company’s growth. The $7
million, 22-employee company specializes in coordinating trials for heart
and blood vessel devices such as stents. However, Eminent products
typically have a market lifespan of only 18 months before being replaced
by newer models.

According to Inc’s Special Technology Report: Inside Story, Eminent
used to send 150 to 500-page study-protocol documents to participating
physicians and regulators, who marked them up and mailed them
back. Sometimes the hefty hard copies made several round trips before
everybody agreed on protocols – a process that typically took at least two
months. The lengthy procedure caused some customers to forgo putting
their devices on the market altogether, which meant less work for Eminent.

“Turnaround time is key,” said Linda Laak, vice-president and chief
operating officer. “Our competition is not necessarily another company but
whether or not the client will do the study at all.”

That changed in February 2001, when Eminent launched an extranet
that allows doctors nationwide to collaborate on protocols electronically.
The system sliced the approval process from two months to two weeks.
Meanwhile, although Eminent spent $50,000 to launch its private Web
site, Laak estimates that the company saves 10 times that amount by
eliminating the ’heavy lifting’ of shipping, storage, and paying the salaries
of two administrative people who handled all the documents. And the
company can handle 10 times as many projects as before, resulting in a
40% increase in revenues

C A S E S T U D Y:

Eminent Research Systems launched an extranet that allows doctors
nationwide to collaborate on protocols electronically. The system
sliced the approval process from two months to two weeks. The initial
$50,000 launch price has saved an estimated “10 times that amount
by eliminating the “heavy lifting” of shipping, storage, and paying the
salaries of two administrative people who handled all the documents.”

(Source: Jill Hecht Maxwell, Special Technology Report: Inside Story,
www.Inc.com, April 2002)

Finding ROI 45

PROCUREMENT
With the break-neck pace and changes in today’s ultra competitive
economy, many organizations are looking at every possible means to
reduce costs and improve organizational efficiency. Some consider
e-procurement to be the ‘holy grail’ for delivering operational efficiencies.

Today, most organizations still rely on traditional purchasing that involves
complex and confusing paper-based systems requiring many ‘paper
pushing’ employees dedicated solely to processing dozens of forms and
some custom electronic applications. Processing a wide variety of paper,
sometimes in combination with electronic order forms, is costly, time-
consuming, prone to manual data-entry errors, and is often difficult or
impossible to integrate with order delivery and payment.

Electronic procurement or e-procurement automates the costly and
inefficient traditional means of purchasing products and services such
as office supplies and computer equipment. E-procurement allows
employees to purchase directly from their desktops from pre-determined
and preferred suppliers while ensuring compliance with corporate rules
and trading agreements.

C A S E S T U D Y:

Microsoft’s intranet-based e-procurement application, MS Market,
allows employees to place orders for work-related products and
services directly from their desktops. Products and services include
business cards, office supplies, computer hardware, travel services,
business shipping, catering, and vendor contracts. Integrating with
SAP R/3, (MS’s ERP), MS Market streamlines order processing,
facilitates billing, and reduces administrative overhead.

MS Market manages more than 400,000 orders per year, at a total
value of over US$5 billion, and has reduced processing costs
from US$60 to $5 per order—saving Microsoft US$7.3 million per
year. Since its implementation, 17 of the 19 people dedicated to
processing purchasing orders have been re-allocated to more
productive jobs.

(Source: Microsoft.com, 2000)

Prior to introducing an e-procurement system, Microsoft was inundated
with thousands of high-volume, low-cost purchase transactions –
representing 70% of Microsoft’s procurement. Today, Microsoft is able
to purchase and arrange the delivery of products and services at record
speed, requiring fewer people and producing savings of more than 90%
compared to purchasing prior to implementing e-procurement.
Finding ROI 46

“Traditional purchasing is tremendously
inefficient and costly,” said Tim Canadian-based retailer
Minahan, an e-commerce analyst at Hudson Bay Co. is now
the Aberdeen Group, in a Fortune purchasing 95% of its
magazine interview. “Most user merchandise inventory
organizations that we surveyed were online for its 500 retail
able to realize more than a 300% return stores representing over
on investment in Internet procurement 70,000 employees.
automation within the first year of
deployment.” By moving to an
e-procurement based
Even purchasing and credit card system, Hudson Bay has
companies like Visa have begun reduced its purchasing
linking with software providers to staff, increased control
create a back-end infrastructure over buying, speeded-up
for e-procurement facilitation and the buying cycle, reduced
payment. its inventory requirements
by “four or five days”
The bottom line: e-procurement and reduced its invoicing
allows organizations to find significant related to its restaurants
efficiencies and savings from all alone by 70%.
operating areas and deliver those
savings directly to their bottom line. (Source: Ideas Magazine,
“Point, click, buy,”
Some of the many e-procurement Issue Two, 2001)
benefits versus traditional purchasing
include:

1. Increased control over purchasing process
2. Speeding-up the purchasing process
3. Reduced inventory requirements (just-in-time inventory)
4. Reduced working capital budget
5. Increased collaboration reduces supplier bargaining time
6. Reduced invoice processing, distribution and printing costs
7. Open standard approach reduces costly reliance on proprietary
standards
8. Enhanced catalog searching and distribution
9. Real-time workflow and management approval
10. Reduced processing errors and associated costs
11. Outsourced model (Application Service Provider) eliminates capital
costs
12. Increased collaboration and information sharing for sales cycle
(sharing sales forecasts, inventory levels, promotions, client
scheduling, etc.)
13. Wider marketing reach via Internet than EDI or catalogs
14. Application development is less complex and costly than EDI

Finding ROI 47

C A S E S T U D Y:

British Telecom (BT), one of the largest telcos on the planet, is also
one of the biggest corporate buyers in Europe – procuring US$8.8
billion in goods and services each year. BT has been transforming
itself into a web-enabled, e-business for some time. Launched in
the mid-1990s, BT’s intranet has delivered an audited ROI of over
1000%. E-procurement has also delivered to the company’s bottom
line and unearthed cost and efficiency savings in its drive to become
increasingly competitive in a hyper competitive market.

While it currently makes 1.3 million purchasing transactions of
indirect goods each year, BT plans to purchase 95% of all its goods –
including desktop computing, stationery, clothing, travel and agency
staff – using e-procurement by early 2001. BT has already reduced the
average purchasing transaction cost from US$113 per transaction to
$80 per transaction, and hopes to further lower that cost to US$8 per
transaction.

(Source: Fortune, E-procurement:
The Transformation of Corporate Purchasing, 2000)

Finding ROI 48

HIGH-VALUE WEB APPLICATIONS
While significant ROI can be garnered from reducing publishing costs,
web-enabling human resource functions and e-procurement, more and
more innovative business functions are migrating to the intranet in the
form of web applications – ringing up impressive return on investment
value.

In addition to some already mentioned, other popular applications found
on leading intranets today include:

• Expense reporting
• E-learning (online training)
• Webcasting (streaming audio and video)
• Online travel tools (reservations, maps)
• Wireless intranet access
• Web sales tools (demos, brochures, tracking)
• Discussion groups and ichat
• Online classifieds (buy and sell)

A recent META Group study measured quantifiable benefits in a number
of areas including information distribution, development simplification,
reduction of infrastructure costs, process improvement, development of
supply chain connections, and new business revenue. However, the study
concludes that the highest ROI came from mission-critical applications
supporting specific business units.

C A S E S T U D Y:

One of the more popular and successful intranet applications at
Cisco Systems is the METRO expense reporting application. All Cisco
employees must submit their personal business expenses via the
intranet – which has not only saved the company millions, but also
reduced the waiting time for employee reimbursement.

METRO reduced the cost of processing employee expense reports
(compared to the traditional paper system) from US$50.69 in 1996 to
$1.90 in 1999 – a whopping 96% reduction.

Total METRO savings in 1999 totaled US$77 million. At the same
time, the time required for processing each expense report dropped
from an average of 21 days to only 4 days.

(Source: Cisco Systems)

Finding ROI 49

ROI S T U D Y:

A recent META Group Study found that applications deployed on an
intranet are most critical and that leading intranet companies achieve
the highest ROI with applications supporting mission-critical, value-
added line-of-business functions (for both internal users and external
supply chain partners). META found the highest average ROI for the
following applications:

Application ROI
Publishing 27%
Order Management 39%
Collaboration 40%
Commerce 44%
Customer Service 47%
Inventory Management 53%
Database Access 68%

(Source: META Group Study, Microsoft.com)

Finding ROI 50

EMPHASIS ON In spring 1996, Williams and
PLANNING Wilkins agreed on the need to
hire a non-partisan third-party
to assess their internal online
As demonstrated in the previous
environment.
sections, and throughout the case
studies documented herein, there are Before proceeding with any
many components to a successful planning or build, a third-
intranet. The rigor and execution party vendor conducted an
required to build and maintain a assessment that included the
successful intranet is massive – from study of current processes,
governance to content management, and interviews with employees
and from technology to business at all levels during a six-week
processes. At the heart of a successful period.
intranet is the strength of the plan upon
(Source: CIO Magazine,
which it rests.
March 1998)

Failure to develop an integrated plan
that accounts for an organization’s
structure, stakeholder, and user requirements will almost certainly ensure
failure and, with it, a loss of significant time, money and jobs.

An intranet manager at a major communications company recently
lamented the phenomenal amount of time, money and effort exhausted in
evolving their enterprise intranet portal that serves tens of thousands of
employees. In one year, the intranet was redesigned three times – sucking
significant funds and patience from an organization that should be using
the intranet to support rather than drain the bottom-line. Of an extended
team of more than a dozen people working on the intranet, only one
person remains.

The problem here and in many cases
Prior to building its corporate
was that executive whims shaped
portal, the Region of Peel in
Southern Ontario undertook
the intranet instead of research
an assessment and planning and requirements. Other threats
process that aligned the include management seizing control,
project with the Region’s especially where managers of various
strategic and corporate departments vie for profile and editorial
priorities. power, and intranet design and
redesigns based on a myriad of product
The process then included demos and vendor presentations.
meetings with employees,
employee surveys and focus “Too many intranets and portals fail or
groups, internal content
don’t live up to their potential because
reviews for each department,
the development of a content
they lack direction and often become
management strategy, and a political football torn between rival
training for a large network of groups and competing priorities within
content publishers. an organization,” says Carmine Porco,
Vice-President, Prescient Digital Media,
(Source: Region of Peel) a veteran consultant who has also

Finding ROI 51

worked for Cisco and Deloitte Consulting. “First, you have to get your
stakeholders to agree, in the form of a strategic plan and vision, on how
the intranet should work and evolve. But you also need to understand
what employees want and expect; and then marry the two.”

Before undertaking any intranet plan or build, an extensive needs or
business requirements assessment is necessary to identify, develop,
prioritize, and document goals and current practices. The assessment
should include stakeholder interviews and input, as well as user research,
and possibly stakeholder workshops. Armed with the acquired data
and knowledge, a detailed strategic blueprint, information architecture,
technology, and ROI plans – can be crafted to build a leading-edge
intranet portal.

The assessment serves two important needs: it documents the needs and
requirements of the user population, for the purpose of answering those
needs; and it addresses the politics of intranet ownership and governance
by engaging everyone who has a business stake in the intranet. In the
majority of organizations, technology is not the biggest intranet challenge.
The biggest challenge is politics – specifically, the political challenge of
who owns or should own and manage the intranet or corporate portal. As
such, it is frequently recommended that organizations consider engaging
a third-party or consultant to conduct the assessment. While the cost may
be prohibitive for organizations with tight budgets, a third-party may be
more successful in gathering sensitive opinions and feedback, as they,
unlike stakeholders, have no personal attachment or stake in neither the
intranet nor a political agenda.

As the intranet is not just a single internal site, but the sum of the internal
infrastructure including all sites and the enterprise email system, it makes
no practical business sense for it to be wholly owned or managed by one
group – be it IT, communications, HR or anyone else. The enterprise portal
is no different. The intranet and the organization’s portal should serve the
business needs of all users, not just the users in one area of the company.
Therefore, the needs and requirements of each stakeholder and user
are relevant and each needs to be engaged as part of the assessment
process. This does not mean, however, that every single employee
needs to be asked his or her opinion. It does mean that a representative
sampling of user opinions is crucial to gathering an accurate reading on
user needs and requirements.

For all intranet and portal undertakings, there are generally five major
phases: assessment, planning, technology audit and specifications,
design and build, and promote and launch. There are many ways
to categorize and break down the project management cycle or
methodology, and many sub-phases or stages for each of the five
major phases listed below. However, the cycle illustrated below is a fair
representation of Prescient Digital Media’s recommended intranet project
management cycle.

Finding ROI 52

PRESCIENT DIGITAL MEDIA’S METHODOLOGY

The first two phases, assessment followed by planning, are perhaps the
two most important phases; without undertaking rigorous and thorough
assessment and planning stages, the subsequent three phases will not
realize their potential.

The purpose of the assessment is to identify the organization’s needs and
requirements. Steps in the assessment phase should include:
• Stakeholder interviews
• User surveys
• User focus groups
• Review of existing research (employee and communication surveys)
• Usability testing
• Benchmarking (best practices)

Once the needs and requirements are identified, the planning – or the
answer to the expressed needs – may begin. The planning phase maps
out the strategic and tactical approach to building or redesigning your
intranet and/or corporate portal. Once the planning phase is complete,
the end result should be an expansive strategic plan with many elements
including:

• Strategic plan
• Success measures and measurement plan
• Organizational recommendations
• Functional brief and plan
• Change management plan
• Marketing and promotional plan
• Funding model
• Business case and ROI model
• Information architecture
• High-level wireframes
• Design concept
• Governance model
• Content management plan
Finding ROI 53

While the technology audit and specifications phase has been separated
from the assessment and planning stages here, the audit and the mapping
of the required specifications are in fact assessment
and planning exercises. It is not uncommon to lump this phase into the
assessment and planning phases. In this critical phase,
current technology (infrastructure, hardware, software, capacity, etc.) that
is deployed within the organization is documented.

A gap analysis is then performed in conjunction with the technology
(hardware and software) and vendor evaluations to determine what is
required to deliver the functionality specified in the plan.

By committing to a formal and thorough assessment process, the
uncertainty and risk of undertaking large-scale intranet endeavors, often
involving multiple stakeholder and user groups inside and outside the
organization, is greatly reduced or eliminated. The assessment stage also
serves as an important political measure for securing stakeholder buy-in
and support. Without undertaking proper assessment and planning, an
organization will run the risk of not securing the needed consensus to
deliver a solution that is acceptable to all – which is critical for delivering
value and motivating use.

If the intranet solution is not acceptable to all groups that will use it, the
solution may require re-engineering or termination – costing far more
time and money than the recommended route of properly assessing
and planning your intranet from the beginning. Most importantly, the
assessment and planning stages provide the foundation for creating a
sound and leading edge model for the building phases of your intranet.

C A S E S T U D Y:

Toronto-based Manulife Financial is a global insurance and financial services
company. With its global reach and need to remain competitive, Manulife
decided to evolve its current Lotus Notes database system into one that will be
a true, web-based portal.

Before undertaking any coding, design or choosing any software or technology,
Manulife undertook a thorough assessment of their internal environment to
serve as the foundation for developing a comprehensive strategic plan. The
assessment included internal research and interviews with 35 key stakeholders
at Manulife.

The final Plan serves as a strategic and functional blueprint with more than
250 pages and 50 recommendations for the development, governance,
and management of the proposed portal. Included in the plan are detailed
functional recommendations, the information architecture schematic detailing
the portal’s navigation, case studies and benchmarks of leading intranet
companies, governance and content management recommendations, the
portal’s creative design, and a business case with a planned return on
investment (ROI).

(Source: Manulife Financial)

Finding ROI 54

MORE THAN MONEY Cisco Systems,
Oracle and General
While appraising the return on Electric (GE) are only three
investment of an organization’s intranet high-profile technology
or portal is critical for most executive cheerleaders that have
leaders, there exists a great deal of received millions of dollars
untapped, intangible ROI that is perhaps in free publicity from media
even more critical than the measured outlets documenting each
dollars and cents. company’s success in
reducing operating costs
David Upton, a professor at the and increasing revenue
Harvard Business School, believes due to their investments
that it is foolhardy to measure the in Internet (and intranet)
value of either an intranet or Internet technology.
site merely in terms of cost savings
and cost avoidance. “The Internet has GE’s CEO, Jack Welch, has
the potential to lead to new business become a web poster boy
models that managers may not currently of sorts after his legendary
be aware of,” explained Upton in a claim that GE will save as
CIO Web Business Magazine article. much as $10 billion over the
Upton believes that the best means for next two years.
measuring an intranet’s value is to treat
it as a financial investment. “Every day we uncover
hundreds of millions of
Upton encourages organizations to dollars in efficiencies,” said
experiment with technology while Welch.
basing decisions on lessons learned
from their experimenting. “It’s like an (Source: The Industry
option-value in the future,” he said. “The Standard, January 22,
value of investing in the Web comes 2001)
from the options it will create for an
organization in the future.”

Mitre Corp executives agree. “Our most important gain can’t be as easily
measured – the quality and innovation in our solutions that become
realizable when you have all this information at your fingertips,” said Mitre
CIO Al Grasso in an interview with CIO Web Business Magazine.

“Our high-level (priority)…is to make it easier for people to give
information to others and to use information from others to solve the next
problem that comes along,” added Mark Maybury, Mitre’s director of
artificial intelligence and executive director of the IT division.

Of course, there are many other important, intangible benefits that cannot
be measured (or are very difficult to measure) that deserve attention. A
well-planned and deployed intranet can lift an organization’s reputation
in the market. Companies such as Cisco Systems, General Electric
and Oracle have received millions of dollars in free publicity and media
coverage related to their in-house efforts to reduce costs and increase
operational efficiencies thanks to their internal and external use of Internet
Finding ROI 55

(and intranet) technology. While the free advertising surely enhances
revenue and long-term profitability for these progressive companies, the
attention also serves as a highly successful recruiting tool. People love
winners, and the frequent praise and attention served by the media for
these technology leaders also serve notice to potential employees making
recruiting new people and retaining existing people a lot easier, and a lot
less expensive.

Before rolling out the corporate intranet,
knowledge was closely held within various
workgroups and silos, rarely diffusing
outside the immediate workspace at
Massachusetts-based Mitre Corp.
Since the release of the corporate
intranet, employees talk openly and
knowledgeably about projects they are
not directly connected to. As most leading The Sodexho intranet home,
compliments of SodexhoUSA
intranet companies do, Mitre measures (“Revolutionizing Employee
the use and contributions to the intranet. Communication”, Angelo Ioffreda,
By analyzing content usage and intranet Sodexho USA)
metrics, Mitre discovered that 35% of all
staff publish technical information on the intranet on a daily basis, and
approximately 60% retrieve technical information several times a day. In
1995, information collections within Mitre numbered less than 100 – as of
early 2000, there were more than 300. (Source: Debby Young, CIO Web
Business Magazine, May 1, 2000)

At Eckert Seamans Cherin & Mellott, a Pittsburgh law firm, an extranet
became the key to going national without opening any additional offices.
The 44-year-old firm wanted to serve as the national coordinator for
thousands of product-liability claims against a major client. But the firm
couldn’t possibly set up shop in all the affected jurisdictions: 50 states,
Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands. Instead, the firm’s executive team
decided it needed two things: a network of partners and a network
connecting them. Those partners were ’local counsel’ – dozens of far-flung
law firms that Eckert Seamans hired to handle claims in their own states.
The network that connected them was Eckert Seamans’s extranet, which
contained all related documents, including briefs, transcripts, interviews,
research, medical and scientific information, and correspondence.

Obviously, storing paperwork in one location helps everybody access
documents faster. But Eckert Seamans argued that the extranet provided
two more important benefits. First, it was an unprecedented way to
provide clients with a consistent nationwide defense by making sure
that all the lawyers are literally on the same page. In addition, it saved
time and money by providing those far-flung partners with research to
strengthen the cases in their states. And the extranet let the firm’s 215
lawyers coordinate cases in a way they couldn’t have before. “There is no
way we could have managed and provided oversight to claims in Texas or
California,” said the firm’s executive director, James Parks, citing the time
Finding ROI 56

C A S E S T U D Y:

In 1995, Mitre Corp.’s intranet averaged 438,000 requests per month.
By 2000, the intranet averaged 8 million requests per month. Mitre’s
intranet has been so well received that 91% of employees felt the
intranet had a positive effect on their productivity – enabling them to
find information or expertise when needed.

(Source: Debby Young,
CIO Web Business Magazine, May 1, 2000)

and cost of constant travel, telephone calls, and shipping tons of hard
copies cross-country.

The system, part of a complete technology overhaul, didn’t come cheap:
Parks estimates that Eckert Seamans had invested nearly
$1.3 million as of 2002, including construction costs to create a separate
technology center. But chief operating officer Dennis L. Veraldi was
philosophical about the cost. “Sophisticated, larger clients just expect that
you’re going to be able to do those things, that you have the capability
to service them,” he said. The firm did not worry much about tracking
the system’s return on investment. “It’s part of the infrastructure, part of
the overhead,” Parks said. “You have to manage it the same way you
manage supplies or telephones or receptionists or libraries or anything
else.” But he credited the technology with cutting legal-work costs by 6%
to 7% annually and allowing the firm to take on more clients (source: Inc.
Magazine, Special Technology Report: Inside Story, www.inc.com, April
2002)

Last but not least, the most effective intranets greatly enhance
communications between all levels of employees and users within an
organization – regardless of their geographic or hierarchical location. And
while improved communications is difficult to measure in terms of dollars
and cents, many organizations conduct annual communications surveys
to measure and gauge satisfaction rates among employees. Of course,
when internal communications is strong and well regarded by employees,
the organization’s culture is almost always positive and motivating – and
every organization values a healthy and rewarding culture.

Finding ROI 57

R O I S T U D Y:

Of the respondents to the Prescient Digital Media ROI survey that undertake
‘rough estimates’ of their organization’s intranet, answers varied from $0 to
$20 million. The average annual ROI of respondent intranets fell just shy of
$1 million ($979,775.58).

While less than 20% of organizations have measured specific benefits, a
majority of organizations have at the very least made a ‘rough estimate’ or
guess of the value of their ROI.

ROI STUDY FINDINGS
Despite all the fuss and talk of measuring the ROI of intranets, a new
study confirms a widely held suspicion: most organizations spend little or
no time measuring intranet ROI.

A study, conducted by Prescient Digital Media Ltd., found that only 6%
of organizations undertake ongoing, specific measurement of the ROI of
their intranet. Occasional measurement is undertaken by only 24% of
organizations and 51% either do no measurement, don’t know if they do,
or only guess at the ROI. 18% are considering ROI measurements.

The study drew responses from more than 240 participants – intranet
managers, professionals and consultants – representing the intranets of
a wide variety of organizations including KPMG, Scotiabank, Volvo, Shell,
RBC Financial Group, New York Life, Hewlett Packard and others.1

While few organizations are spending significant time accurately
measuring ROI, it is important to 76% of the respondent companies.

Also, while it may rarely be specifically measured, the intranet’s benefits
are inherently appreciated. More than two-thirds of respondents state that
the intranet has improved the productivity of the organization.

Finding ROI 58

The study, conducted in the spring of 2003, was self-select (voluntary) conducted
online with readers of various intranet publications including senior management (VP,
CEO, COO, CIO, etc.), middle management (directors, managers, senior managers) and
consultants who regularly work with their organization’s intranet or with others.

Also, while it may rarely be specifically measured, the intranet’s benefits
are inherently appreciated. More than two-thirds of respondents state that
the intranet has improved the productivity of the organization.

Highly representative of the challenges facing those that manage
intranets, only a bare majority (52%) of organizations surveyed said they
are satisfied or very satisfied with their intranet or portal while 36% are
dissatisfied.

The percentage of organizations with intranet users varied with the wide
range and size of organizations. 60% of organizations had 1000 users or
more while 21% had fewer than 100 users. The largest group had 1,000 to
5,000 intranet users, representing 25% of the survey respondents.

Finding ROI 59

B E N E F I T S:

To gauge exactly what intranet benefits are valued and how they are
measured, the survey segmented benefits into 12 categories:

1. Reduced hard costs: print,
paper and distribution costs. “Although ROI has not
2. Improved sales: increased been established in our
revenue and reduced response current intranet we do see
time. the potential and the need
3. Enhanced communications: to create a more efficient
better, faster employee intranet to be able to reduce
communications. costs and engage employees
4. Enhanced competitiveness: in a more direct method.”
time-to-market, information
accessibility. ROI survey respondent
5. Enhanced application access:
centralized application access.
6. Enhanced infrastructure
utilization: reduced infrastructure and integration costs.
7. Enhanced collaboration: better, cost-effective training and
collaboration.
8. Reduced product cycle: reduced inventory and faster invoicing.
9. Improved customer service: improved information retrieval and
customer self-service.
10. Enhanced human resources: reduced administrative costs and
improved employee retention.
11. Enhanced procurement: reduced cost and time of purchasing
goods.
12. Content management: reduced time and cost of publishing content.

Unfortunately, of all the benefits measured, none of the above benefit
categories is measured in more than 20% of organizations. Most
organizations undertake a ‘rough estimate’ (a guess) and do not undertake
precise measurements.

Leading the measured benefits parade is content management, measured
Finding ROI 60

in 20% of the respondent organizations with 42% of respondents
undertaking a rough estimate (a guess) of content management’s ROI
value. Other leading areas of measurement included communications,
application access, human resources and infrastructure utilization.

Percentage of organizations measuring specific ROI benefits:

Measured Rough No
Measured ROI Benefit
Estimate Estimate Measurement
Content management 20% 46% 42%

Communications 18% 53% 29%

Application access 17% 37% 45%

Human resources 15% 51% 34%

Infrastructure utilization 13% 37% 49%

It is interesting to note that while
fewer than 20% of the organizations The average annual ROI
surveyed have undertaken of respondent intranets
measurements of specific benefits, a fell just shy of $1 million
majority of organizations have at the ($979,775.58)
very least made a ‘rough estimate’ or
guess of the value of their ROI.

Of those that measure or offer ‘rough estimates’ of the ROI of their
organization’s intranet, answers varied from $0 to $20 million. The average
annual ROI of respondent intranets fell just shy of $1 million ($979,775.58).

Respondents were also asked to provide a measured (or estimated) yearly
ROI of each of the 12 benefits.

Measured ROI Benefits Average Yearly ROI
Content management 31%

Applications access 28%

Human resources 27%

Collaboration 27%

Hard costs 25%

Not surprisingly, content management is the intranet ROI champion, with
an average yearly ROI of 31% among the respondent organizations. This
correlates well with the perceived value of an ROI benefit. In part I of the
Intranet ROI survey respondents were asked to rate the most important
areas for intranet ROI measurement. Content management was cited as
important or very important by 87% of the respondents – second only to
competitiveness (90%).

More surprisingly is the ROI of intranet communications. According
Finding ROI 61

to the survey participants, the average yearly communications ROI of
respondent intranets is only 11% – the least of all ROI benefit categories.
Conversely, communications ranks second in importance – tied with
content management.

MEASURING THE ROIS OF INTRANETS: MISSION POSSIBLE?

There is a lot of hype surrounding ROI. Everyone and their application
service provider are trumpeting the benefits of intranet applications
and portals. Truth be told, measuring the ROI of an intranet appears to
be more art than science. Few organizations are actually measuring an
intranet’s benefit in terms of dollars and cents (or pounds and pence).

There is no ‘magic bullet’ to appraise the dollar value of an intranet.
Measuring the ROI of a corporate intranet or portal is, at best, an
imperfect science. In fact, it is impossible to measure an intranet’s exact
dollar value. Although measuring the precise return on investment may not
be possible, more organizations are, nevertheless, attempting to quantify
both potential and existing ROI.

While technology stalwarts such as Cisco and Oracle have made big
strides in appraising (largely for marketing purposes and bragging rights)
the dollar value and performance of their existing intranets, few others
have done any extensive measurement.

To better understand how organizations value and measure the ROI of
their intranets, Prescient Digital Media partnered with the Katz School
of Business at the University of Pittsburgh to conduct an extensive,
but voluntary, study of willing organizations. The first part of a two-
part survey was conducted in the spring and summer of 2002 through
an online survey tool. While the study is not a scientific sample of a
specific audience, the respondents were a mixture of intranet managers,
consultants and readers of Intranet Journal. This diverse group of
people offered unique intelligence into the minds of organizations and
professionals operating corporate intranets.

Two-hundred and seventy-five (275) survey participants were asked
to rank in order of importance almost 70 different intranet investment
benefits organized according to 12 broad categories.

1. Hard costs
2. Sales
3. Communications
4. Competitiveness
5. Application access
6. Infrastructure utilization
7. Collaboration
8. Time to market (cycle time)
9. Customer service
10. Human resources
Finding ROI 62

11. Procurement
12. Content management

The findings were somewhat surprising: softer, harder to measure benefits
such as competitiveness, communications and content management (the
big ‘C’s’) were rated the most important. Traditional areas of focus for ROI
benefits, including procurement, sales and time to market, were rated
among the lowest benefit categories.

Most important benefit categories
1. Enhanced competitiveness 90%
2. Content management 87%
3. Enhanced communications 87%
4. Hard cost reduction 86%
5. Enhanced customer service 85%

Most important benefit categories
1. Enhanced competitiveness 90%
2. Content management 87%
3. Enhanced communications 87%
4. Hard cost reduction 86%
5. Enhanced customer service 85%

“I’m not that surprised,” said David Yockelson, an executive vice-president
and director with META Group, a technology research and analysis firm.
“The value of the intranet to me is going to be more around productivity
and soft costs. My expectations are more about communicating more
freely, time savings, and information availability rather than sales and hard
cost savings.”

When survey participants were asked to rank specific line item benefits
(almost 70 in all), access to information, as well as increased sharing
and accuracy of information led the benefit parade. The lowest ranking
benefits related to procurement and time to market.

Most important ROI benefits
1. Improved information sharing (customer svc.) 97%
2. Enhanced communications and information
sharing (communications) 95%
3. Increased consistency of info (customer svc.) 94%
4. Increased accuracy of info (customer svc.) 93%
5. Reduced or eliminated processing 93%
6. Easier organizational publishing 92%

Finding ROI 63

Least important ROI benefits
1. Reduced capital cost by using ASP 43%
2. Reduced reliance on proprietary standards (vs.
open standards) 54%
3. Reduced inventory 55%
4. Increased collaboration w/ vendors reducing time 55%
5. Wider marketing reach (Internet v. EDI &
Catalogues) 58%
6. Increased control over purchasing process 63%

Again, specific benefits relate to customer service, communication and
content management – access to and accuracy of information. While
the results may be somewhat unexpected given the emphasis on softer
benefits, the results were appreciated by some of the pundits.

Yet, as many readers and intranet managers can attest, executives
want to see hard savings. While soft benefits can produce some ‘wow’
numbers, including millions of dollars attributed to time saved (improved
productivity), corporate bean counters want to see cold, hard numbers.

“What is more convincing? Clearly the hard cost savings,” Yockelson said.
“Nobody wants to hand out money for anything – times are tight. If you
can’t justify it, it won’t happen. They’re (executives) bristling at any costs.”

CONCLUSION

The ROI of an intranet is sought after and valued at most organizations,
but few are undertaking specific measurement programs to quantify
the value of their intranet investments. While a majority of organizations
make a rough estimate (guess) at the value of specific intranet benefits,
still more are planning to measure ROI. To quantify the ROI of an
intranet, organizations will have to act decisively to establish baseline
measurements for future comparison while enlisting the support and
efforts of other people and departments across the organization to
determine specific benefits for measurement.

As with any critical business system, the intranet must deliver measurable
performance and remain accountable to the investment. If you are not
measuring your intranet’s value, then you risk failing the needs and
demands of both employees and management.

Finding ROI 64

ABOUT PRESCIENT STRATEGIC SERVICES:

Prescient Digital Media is a group of senior • Strategic Planning
intranet and e-business consultants based
• Functional Planning
in Toronto and Vancouver who support
clients across North America. We provide
• Measurement Planning
strategic web and intranet consulting, • Business &
planning and communications services to Environment Assessment
organizations of all sizes, enabling them • Blueprint Development
to compete more effectively in the digital • Website & Intranet Design
economy. • Benchmarking & Best
Practices
We leverage strategic relationships,
communications expertise and
• Knowledge Management
benchmarked best practices to plan and • Content Management
deliver websites that are focused on • Information Architecture
our client’s key objectives and provide • Corporate & Enterprise
significant return on investment. Our Work Portals
consultants’ expertise is focused on • Human Resource Tools &
helping clients to take full advantage of
Applications
the opportunities that exist right now while
building a foundation for future success.
• Online Training
• E-procurement
Prescient provides innovative • Internal Communications &
methodologies and tools that facilitate the Marketing
development of web-enabled solutions in • Media Relations
a manner that is timely, cost-effective, and • Vendor Selection &
most importantly, closely aligned with our
Management
client’s strategic business direction.

Prescient’s focus includes the assessment, Visit our website at:
planning, technology selection, content and www.PrescientDigital.com
launch of intranets, websites, and web-based
tools for industry leaders in a variety of sectors. Read our blog on intranets at:
www.IntranetBlog.com
Prescient Internet and intranet services include:
• Analysis - evaluation, business requirements, Follow our CEO on Twitter:
user research, and benchmarking
www.Twitter.com/TobyWard
• Planning - strategic planning, functional
specifications, information architecture and Join the Intranet
design. Global Forum on Facebook:
• Technology - platform and application www.Facebook.com
evaluation, selection, and implementation (Search “Intranet”)
• Implementation - design, integration, content,
and tools
• Marketing - communications, content
management, operation, marketing, and SEO

For more information please contact us directly at:
prescient@prescientdigital.com
or 416-926-8800

Finding ROI 65

Finding Intranet ROI (Whitepaper)

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