Collaboration tools- ROI under fire

I have been rattling the ROI cage for these tools for a while now and it seems that the market is beginning to raise the same questions.  See the Forbes article http://onforb.es/RTA59m  .

There is no doubt in my mind that these tools and platforms will transform the way we do business internally and externally.  However we aren’t there yet.

As I have mentioned before in different blogs in the past, the rush to these new platforms reminds me of the early ERP days, when companies were selling these new platforms that would radically change the way businesses worked. After the initial gold rush very little changed, except for a very large investment of time and money and a feeling of having been sold something that actually didn’t live up to the hype.

They then realised that the tools had to be implemented in such a way as to map to the culture of the organisation and that the implementation of these tools had to be treated as change programmes as opposed to ‘tool implementation’ programmes.

Today ERP systems are fundamental to the way organisations run.

I believe that the reason the ROI of these new collaboration platforms is being questioned is for exactly the same reasons as the old ERP days.

Let’s imagine company ‘WidgetMaker Ltd.’, a global organisation in the manufacture and sale of widgets.

WidgetMaker is approached by a person selling the latest in collaboration technology and is sold a great and wonderful list of blue sky benefits that can be realised by the implementation of these tools and of course case studies to support these claims.

WidgetMaker decides to licence 50,000 units of the platform.

The Vendor gives WidgetMaker support in the implementation of the tool, training on the technical aspects of the tool and some ideas on how to roll it out across the organisation and start to realise the benefits of the tool.  Vendor walks away and on to the next sale.  Remember the vendor makes his money selling licences – this is their core business.

WidgetMaker rolls it out across the organisation, does some comms, provides some training on how to use the tool, provides some ‘use case’ VoDs that describe different ways in which you could use the tool to your benefit, perhaps some telephone support, et voila ! You can now sit back and watch all of these benefits start to bubble up and provide you with the gains that you were hoping to realise.

3 months later the Boss of the person that brought in the tool, let’s call him Underling, asks how it is going.  Great replies Underling, I can see from the transactional data that we have already had 20,000 people login and we have 450 groups/communities up and running.  His Boss is pleased with the information.

As the end of the first year approaches the Boss has to report to the board on how the annual investment, let’s say 10 EUR a seat, multiplied by 50,000, i.e. half a million year, is being invested and how these tools have saved the organisation money, generated new revenues etc. to a value greater than the annual investment.

Now, this is where it gets tricky.

Boss asks Underling to provide him with clear examples of where they have increased efficiency, generated new revenue producing ideas, increased employee satisfaction etc.

Underling looks at his transaction data and realises that this doesn’t tell him what he needs to know.  At this point he starts contacting the areas that look the most promising, based upon the transactional data, and tries to find examples that will stand up under scrutiny.  Eventually he finds some examples, and through the use of extrapolating time savings e.g. time savings multiplied by the number of employees in the company, multiplied by the speed of light = huge savings.

A lot of this is a bit tongue in cheek but it is also close to reality.

The other reality is that by now usage has flattened out and perhaps even on the decline.  The early adopters have given it a go and some have succeeded but many others have failed.  Email is still the preferred tool and storing documents on shared servers is still the norm.

The fact is that treating this as a simple tool implementation, and expecting everyone to change the way they work because everyone uses Facebook and that it will suddenly ‘go viral’ is a fallacy.

To succeed takes more than this.  You need this ‘viral’ approach, for sure, but you also need a ‘managed’ approach supported by a clear Change Management programme.

Unsurprisingly this will take time and money to achieve.

This implies that organisations need to build in the costs of such an investment into the investment equation with a clear set of intended, measurable  consequences linked directly back to building business value.   Only then can these tools really deliver the benefits they are supposed to deliver.

About the author : Guy project manages large change programmes for global companies and is deeply involved in collaboration tools and techniques. He has co-authored/developed a framework on ‘how to deliver measurable business value from implementing collaboration platforms in a Managed way’.  Please feel free to contact him on guy@cotechinternational.com for more information.