Business Case and ROI
Social Business Community Wiki
Many business executives requires a business case for all new projects, which often have to include a documentation of expected benefits vs. costs. A business case also serves to get agreement on what the organization is trying to achieve with the project, alternatives, implications, risks, resources required, and timeframe. A project may have a single sponsor, or there may be multiple sponsors or co-sponsors depending on the project’s scope.
Benefits
The use of social technologies opens up new opportunities to tap into the information locked up in employees and customers and to tap into a much broader network of associates. Email is not a good tool for retaining or sharing knowledge, and retiring baby boomers and elimination of “career” employees are creating knowledge retention productivity drains for organizations. In other words, knowledge is leaking from your company. If it is, you need to think about managing your experts' knowledge. New people coming into the workplace are dramatically changing expectations re simplicity, access, mobility, and connectivity.
Here are some sample Enterprise 2.0 impacts on critical success factors.
- Email Replacement/ Reduction
- Portal Replacement
- Collaboration Complexity
- Intermediation
- Externalization
- Innovation Management
- Leveraging IP
- Serendipity
- Customer Support
- SME Establishment
- Community
- Prediction Markets
- Sentiment Analysis
- Supporting Legacy Systems
- Streamlining Integration
Initial StudyThe first step may be to do a quick analysis of the
business drivers for change, which may include formulating a project purpose, identifying project sponsor and objective, prioritizing goals, and how to measure them.
Many organizations
adopt a standard structure for any of their business cases, with the contents arranged in a number of key sections describing purpose, benefits, alternatives, risks, resources, and timeframe. This makes it easy to evaluate different projects, but may also make it difficult to create business cases for all types of projects.
Tips-on-how-to-handle-business-benefits-in-E2-0-type-solutions.
TechnologiesMany organizations have started by implementing blogs to improve communication and to
share expertise, and
wikis to improve collaboration. Microsoft’s SharePoint has gotten a lot of attention the last few years, and many organizations are looking at
using the SharePoint platform for social computing. Google also offers a number of Enterprise solutions, and emerging technologies like
Google Wave may change how we currently use email. There are also a variety of vendors with Enterprise 2.0 suites that include things like blogs, wikis, COI/COP formation via ad hoc grouping, etc. Recently, open source has begun making inroads as well, with distributions like
Drupal Commons providing all these capabilities as free software with commercial support and backing.
Social media sites such as Facebook, Wikipedia, and YouTube are also driving business to Enterprise 2.0. There are also benefits of also using tools like
Twitter for business usage, but we need more use cases that document the business benefits of different E2.0 technologies. Though, we can identify some
of collaboration's return on investment. Additionally, there are steps that you can take as you plan collaboration initiatives, that you will maximize your
benefits from collaboration.
