Many of us have been studying content management systems for years.
We've managed the ins and outs of CM in different situations and for different clients, made different cases.
We know the benefits, pitfalls and risks.
Yet, professionals from different backgrounds and involved in different aspects of enterprise systems, are now coming to face, many for the first time, a content management challenge.
People are realising that - willy nilly - content management is what they've got to come to terms with if they want to achieve competitiveness in today's information centric environments - it doesn't matter from what angle of their systems they look at, it's the content puzzle that they've got to crack.
And they all still ask the same question, whats ROI calculation?
How do I make my business case?
I am sometimes tempted to say: wait a while longer, and all the questions will answer themselves before you know it.
It should not be too difficult to demonstrate that a new, up-to-date system delivers efficiency.
That generally translates as cost saving, at a cost.
What can be expressed as 'efficiency', can similarly be thought of as 'productivity'.
Calculate current productivity rate - of each department, of each employee, of the entire operation - then calculate the productivity rate after implementation, given the appropriate, optimal choices, and you'll end up with a positive integer that shoud speak for itself.
Different benefits can be listed under different categories and roles, and more or less correspond to the standard benefits that all new information systems deliver.
A content management system however, offers a unique category of enterprise benefits.
It allows an organisation to leverage its creative and knowledge assets, more than any other system that they can buy. Authors - that includes editors, and other roles corresponding to different phases in the content lifecycle - are extremely valuable to organisations in these days of content centric applications and content pervasiveness that dominates enterprise environments.
Let's not forget that content is the physical expression of 'knowledge', possibly the most precious resource that an organisation owns, after their gold reserves, provided they have any.
So, while it is useful to measure all the standard parameters that can improve the efficiency of an organisation, the ability to identify the intrinsic value of content, and facilitate its contribution to all organisational processes is vital to understand ROI for CMS.
Leveraging the value of content
Well deployed CMSs allow an organisation to leverage the value of all its content, and inherently, both internal and external knowledge.
So what does content mean to the marketing department?
What does it mean to the sales department?
Understanding the value of content to each class of user in an organisation is the first step towards calculating the ROI.
A well deployed CMS will integrate with the entire corpus of information systems, to allow a constant interaction between people's intelligence, knowledge and creative potential, and their work.It's important not to make the mistake of taking into account the current scenario as the only basis for such calculation.
Assuming 'content', and all its related processes is currently of little relevance to the marketing department , before implementing a CMS, then what you must think really is how relevant it would be, if available, well managed, maybe matched intelligently and semantically to all the processes of the Marketing department.
So look at what lies ahead, irrespective of how incredible the scenario may appear.
A common question is, how much productivity increase should we expect to justify the cost of implementing and updating a CMS?
The common sense answer provided by conventional business books is: the increase of value of productivity should at least be equivalent to the implementation cost, over a given period of time.
How long should your organisation amortize its technology investment for, really depends on the financial and economic reality of the organisation.
Let your CFO make a suggestionIn terms of metrics, the bottom line return for a CMS implementation is to optimise operating costs. But of course improved information flow, and other intangible benefits should all be calculated as part of ROI. I have been an early proponent of 'ease of use' and 'user happiness' as fundamental metric parameters since the beginning of content management discussions.
But there is more.The ability to be competitive in a fast changing environment is not to be disregarded.
A modern, up to date implementation will allow an organisation to keep the pace with the changes that are taking place in the rest of the world.Content, for the information and knowledge centric enterprise, is equivalent to currency.
A well thought, carefully implemented application allows users to dynamically adjust to the unpredictable complex changes that characterize our information environments today.
