One question that came up on the Wednesday night of wikis was around ROI. What is the ROI for a wiki?
Olivier Headshift talks about ROI. And I agree with Simon Carswell's comment that the "I" should be low. This statement provoked the justifiable question about the effort involved in wiki development & management. Sven made the excellent point that there is little "extra" effort that goes into wiki activities. People are sending emails and messing about with Word documents anyway. But these activities are largely invisible.
All the Enterprise 2.0 stuff is really about collaboration in organisations. And collaboration is all about improving productivity and nuturing creativity. However most organisations do not measure their worker productivity well (and they have no idea whatsoever about worker creativity). This is especially true for organisations with workers who think for a living. Professional services firms tend to measure productivity as billable hours. However the billable hour model simply means that you've spent an hour doing something. The only incentive to do it better or quicker is the possibility your competition might.
If asking the ROI question prompts you to discuss the productivity & practices of your workers with them then it could be useful. Otherwise I share Olivier's concerns about playing ROI games.
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Our web 2.0 explorations & implementations are below the radar because of the low I. The only hurdle that we have to get over is the level of R that the people using the tools (eg wiki) get out of it for what they put into it.
I guess what I'm saying is that web 2.0 shifts the RoI question from an enterprise governance level to a personal/professional level.
Andrew - I'd generally agree with that. And I would say again that we are bad at measuring personal productivity.
What have your experiences of measuring this at the personal/professional level?
I think it is possible to measure enterprise impacts for these tools - but they are a bit sketchy...
I'm not measuring it and can't see a way to do so currently. What I meant by "personal/professional level" was that its individuals who make the decision to invest their time to participate, and that they continually make the decision to participate or not.
And that's enough really. If people use it then its valuable.
Now, in addition, I'd like (for example) the national team for whom we're about to install a wiki, to, once they've been using it for a while, be enthusiastic in telling their own story of its value and thus offer encouragement of others to use one.
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