ROI & productivity

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.