My team and I might have cracked it. We’ve developed a way of costing the return on investment (ROI) for improving intranets, and the numbers are striking.
For one organisation’s project they’ll save $500,000 per year by improving their intranet. Another: $1.3 million.
Armed with those kinds of numbers, it’s easier to show why investing in a better intranet makes business sense.
Why this is hard
Demonstrating ROI is harder than it sounds. The benefits are often easy to measure to some extent, but difficult to put dollars against. To find out how an intranet supports culture and cohesion, you can use staff engagement surveys. To find out if the intranet is getting your messages out, you can use page views in analytics.
The problems are also obvious. We know that many intranets are like filing cabinets with no indexes. Policies and guides are crammed into strange corners, sometimes in multiple versions. Staff lose trust. They stop using the intranet altogether.
But what is the concrete business value of fixing these problems? This matters, because intranet redevelopments don’t always go far enough. It’s tempting to only invest at the platform level – transition to the next version of Sharepoint or Drupal. Or to only invest at the container level – rework the information architecture and interface. Then stop.
Intranet content – the actual information people use to do their jobs – is often left behind. Committing the resources to improve the content and maintain it into the future… many organisations don’t get that far.
The result: the intranet is launched, then left to degrade. And they’re back here again in three years.
Solving more of the problem is going to need more of an investment. That’s why showing value is crucial.
Why productivity is the key
This is where measuring staff productivity comes in. When your staff can’t find information on the intranet, that chews up time. And that time has a cost. The cost falls in four areas:
- Increased searching time: staff should be able to find a policy quickly, without going on an epic voyage of discovery.
- Distraction: if staff can’t self-serve from the intranet, our research shows that they’ll often ask a colleague. This makes two people less efficient – the person searching for the information and the person helping them.
- Non-compliance: staff are asked to do something. They don’t (or they follow the wrong process), and you need to follow up with them.
- Slower task completion: if staff don’t know the right way to do something, it will take them longer.
But how do you actually estimate the value of saving time? One option would be to monitor every staff member’s time spent on key business tasks. That’s both creepy and incredibly costly to capture.
So the approach needs to strike a balance between accuracy and efficiency.
We can help
We’ve developed an approach that we think gets the balance right: you get a robust projected saving that’s both backed by research and tailored to your organisation. And, even on the conservative side, that saving can easily run into the hundreds of thousands.
If you’re about to start an intranet project and want to show value, get in touch.
