Don't get high in your own ROI

Luis is writing about ROI here and here. So we cannot ignore ROI or label it "uncool". ROI is a way for certain groups of people (mostly with MBAs) to understand something. These people have a lot of power so it behoves us non-MBAs to learn how they speak. Dennis Howlett has some interesting things to say:

Instead of panning CFOs as looking at the ‘wrong’ stuff and generally pillorying them as retarded, social computing pundits might ask how the flat world of which many profess becomes a reality.

And Dennis right. However the issue is that the links between actual knowledge worker activities and revenue/profitability/etc are often pretty sketchy. Our bean counters cannot count their beans finely enough to make sense of them. Performance is important. But our understanding of it is partial. We must often make educated guesses.

Frankly, I think that the ROI for wikis is pretty clear = Email + Word - A World of Pain = Productivity but I would agree that more research would help here. I would also add that the best research takes place within organisations. Piloting E2.0 tools can give very useful indicators of potential value of comparatively little investment. Any manager about to bet the farm on E2.0 tools without a pilot is a headstrong idiot. One step at a time eh?

However actually constructing an ROI argument is a messy, political activity. That world of pain just popped up again (wow, version 97 of the ROI spreadsheet, boy oh boy) and it's ugly. Very ugly.