METRIC MATTERS: Measuring the ROI of your intranet

By Toby Ward, Prescient Digital Media

Measuring the value of an intranet has moved on leaps and bounds since the early halcyon "bubble" days of the late 1990s. Now, Intranets are present in almost every major corporation. Here, Toby Ward explains the benefits of accurately measuring the ROI of your intranet.

IBM, Oracle and Cisco all measure the impact and benefits of their intranet. All of them have measured the value to be greater than US$1 billion. In fact, IBM has realized benefits from e-learning via the intranet alone to be more than US$284 million.

BT, the UK telecommunications company, uses an online idea jar for employees, called "Personnel Today." Employee ideas have saved BT nearly UK£100 million over the past four years.

As impressive as those numbers are, you don't have to be a large technology company to realize measured ROI benefits. ROI though isn't reserved solely for big multinationals.

QAS is a world leader in address management and data accuracy. Based on data secured from national postal authorities and other leading sources, QAS captures, cleans and enhances the integrity of name and address data.


The company has 400 employees with offices in the UK (headquarters), US, Canada, Singapore, Australia and across Europe and it intranet is delivering measured results and value for the business. Some of the measured ROI benefits include:
• Online expenses: saved four person-days per month.
• Finance savings: online workflow has reduced administrative processing time from two weeks to one day.
• Purchase ordering: saved four person-days per month and an ROI savings of US$20,000 per year
• Sales proposal builder: streamlined proposal and sales process saves almost US$25,000 per year.
• Intranet use: 115 percent increase in usage of the intranet (infers a yet to be measured productivity gain).


Of all the above measurements, perhaps the single most important is ROI. To maximize the intranet's value and potential, you must secure the support of senior management. If you want their attention and support, you better talk their talk. Nothing gets their attention more than ROI.

If executives view the intranet as a cost center, then it's your responsibility to sell the sizzle and prove the value with hard data. ROI is everything in some organizations (for example, in financial services). Other more progressive companies are intent to know and track employee satisfaction and productivity.

Still others want to know both. It all depends on your organization and culture. However, only through measurement will the intranet become a measured quantity and a proven asset.


Excerpted from the new Melcrum report, Transforming your intranet: New techniques in strategy, technology and measurement from the world's leading organizations.

To find out more about the report, click here
SOURCE: The Source