We have received a number of requests recently from companies looking for hard ROI data on our Intranet Collaborative Network so that they can sell our solution internally.  The issue that immediately comes to mind is that each company uses their intranet differently so that quantifying ROI is a subjective exercise.  In other words, every company will realize benefits and ROI differently depending on how they use their Intranet.  I am confident however that a large number of positive benefits can be realized and measured by focusing on specific business needs that address cost savings, revenue gains, or cost avoidance.

A few areas that have proven to yield hard ROI benefits using MindTouch:

1. I have seen companies redeploy or reduce IT staff by creating an “employee driven” Intranet.   Intranet 1.0 was characterized by content that needed to be uploaded by IT staff, where the premise of Collaborative Networks is to allow employees to produce most of the content.
2. There is significant time savings realized by having documents stored centrally and having the ability to edit them directly on the page (not download, open, edit, re-save).  MindTouch is about content management not just document management.   You don’t need Microsoft Office to edit content in MindTouch.
3. Paper forms like expense reports are no longer needed and are being replaced by Intranet versions that allow the routing and approval in a cost effective manner.   Companies are saving money on paper and using less people to approve expense reports.   Managers now have access to reports that detail spending across their department.
4. Data integration used to be an expensive and laborious process marked by countless processes, parochial interests and needs.  Costs to develop integration with SAP, Oracle, Access etc. can approach 7 figures (US$) with other solutions, while integration with MindTouch (due to the way we’ve architected it) is far less and yields better results.

Of course there are many soft ROI benefits that are harder to measure but they do exist.  Your average CFO will ignore these soft costs and refer to it as “gravy”.   Let’s look at some specific examples of companies that have provided us both hard and soft ROI benefits.

An ecommerce company implemented a MindTouch Intranet Solution to address their need to better manage their internal collaboration issues.  They were losing legal documents, contracts, and had trouble finding the latest version of important marketing and sales content.  Many of the contractual legal documents stipulated penalties for non-compliance and spelled out specific responsibilities for which they were failing to implement.  The MindTouch solution provided a safe repository for their legal documents and alerted them to changes or tasks that needed to be completed.

A large Fortune 1000 company used considerable IT resources to keep their Intranet current with the latest department content.  Because their former solution didn’t allow non-administrators to upload or change content, the company needed to employ over 20 people to handle the countless updates, changes and new content that departments across the enterprise were requesting.  Due to the volume, IT became extremely backlogged (at times 45 days late) on updating the multi-national corporation’s Intranet which led to numerous complaints and lackluster employee usage.   Once a MindTouch Intranet Solution was deployed, employees quickly became empowered to update content for which they had permission.   Moreover, IT was able to redeploy their resources to activities that were a higher value to the company.

The examples above illustrate results that yield measurable ROI that can be used to justify a MindTouch Collaborative Intranet investment.  Collaborative Networks will help your organization transform a static, low usage Intranet into a rich, efficient, collaborative system that your employees will use every day.   Not deploying a collaborative network may leave your organization less competitive and less agile as several corporations are starting to realize the benefits of these next generation Intranets.   Take advantage of being early and get a head-start on the competition.  We can have you up and running with a full-featured Intranet solution in less than 60 days.