ROI on K-Logs

garym — Mon, 04 Aug 2003 20:04:00 -0400

Every software installation needs to be mindful of its return, and this is no less true of intranets and portals because, well, these things are expensive investments. How we know our money is well spent, how we predict our returns is critical to knowing how much we're willing to spend to get the job done, and being able to weight the apples against the oranges is the final bottom line when it comes to choosing our software technologies.

One of the stickier choices of late is whether to jump on board traditional "Document Management System" corporate portal CMS, or to dare dip into the burgeoning world of the "Social Computing Network" paradigm; for the IT stewards unfamiliar with social networks, it can be a hard comparison.

Fortunately, John Robb has done the math for us. ROI calculations: K-Logs vs. traditional Intranet Portals is a thoughtful and conservative estimate of the relative ownership costs vs the returns for a 5000-seat corporate information ecosystem, done once from the traditional CMS view, and then done again in the new social computing k-log model.

Allow me to summarize:

Traditional Document-oriented CMS
per-seat cost of ownership:	$807
per-seat effective benefit:	$1,886
Return on Investment:	240%

Social Computing k-log CMS
per-seat cost of ownership:	$50
per-seat effective benefit:	$1,658
Return on Investment:	1,170%

Is it any wonder the demand for our social computing platforms like "Drupal": has soared in the past three months? If you ask me, though, I think his effective benefit on the k-log side is a tad low, but nonetheless ...

Check out John's website for the full breakdown; I don't imagine your mileage will vary that much. And as for the issue of costs associated with employees (and other system participants) losing 35% of their time in the hunt for information, John offers a follow-up article on information availability and the role of k-logs in sifting document spaces for what it is people really need to find.

[ Source: ROI calculations: K-Logs vs. traditional Intranet Portals
see also: What is a k-log? ]

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ROI on K-Logs