Is ROI right for you?
Jinfo Blog

By Tim Buckley Owen

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Demonstrating a good return on investment becomes even more urgent when times are tough. But measuring ROI on information services has always been notoriously difficult – so a new solution from Outsell might just be worth a look.

No question that there’s more of it about. It features strongly in the series of roadshows from AIIM – formerly the Association for Information & Image Management – that is soon to be working its way through the United Kingdom, with sessions on achieving a positive ROI through scanning and capture projects and on the better-than-expected return produced by deploying SharePoint (http://digbig.com/5bbrtp).

Inevitably, too, there are attempts to measure the ROI of social media – particularly in marketing. A webinar and associated guide from online marketing software provider Omniture, prepared by the Aberdeen Research Group, shows how leading companies are monitoring and measuring social media’s effectiveness (http://digbig.com/5bbrtq – registration required).

But, as responses from the information managers interviewed for the last Business Information Review survey and the senior managers polled for a recent Forbes Insight into managing information show, applying similar disciplines to information for the organisation generally remains hard (http://www.vivavip.com/go/e28585).

Not that there aren’t regular attempts – with varying degrees of precision – as last year’s FreePint FUMSI Folio on Adding Value demonstrated (purchase/subscription details at http://web.freepint.com/go/shop/report/1349). Earlier this year, too, the Special Libraries Association teamed up with Shore Communications, using narrative research techniques based on customer stories to try to find out how business information purchasing is re-tooling to meet current challenges (http://www.vivavip.com/go/e27757).

Outsell analyst Roger Strouse, author of the new report Using ROI to Support the IM Value Proposition, regards user-reported benefits as ‘the most feasible approach for most organisations’. Nevertheless, he does also comment that ‘often, the underlying data in an ROI model is based on end-users’ impressions or memories of the benefits they received, and those impressions or memories may be imperfect’.

Outsell’s report (purchase details at http://digbig.com/5bbrtr) offers both a methodology for gathering the data and an online calculator for crunching the numbers. And there’s one particularly good piece of good advice, which Outsell’s offering is designed to assist: Keep it simple.

But if it’s that simple will the accountants believe it – especially if it’s done by ‘amateurs’? There’s always a danger that ROI analyses will be received with scepticism, regardless of the ‘amateur’ status of those performing the research, Roger acknowledges, adding that ‘some executives simply do not believe in the veracity of any type of user-reported ROI data’. That’s why ROI should only be part of the mix, he continues. And he adds the particularly useful advice that a value proposition must consist of components that will resonate with a particular organisation’s management; ‘ROI may or may not be one of them’.

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