In the penultimate session of Share 2011, Sarah Haase is presenting her second session of the conference - about ROI for SharePoint. Key topics:
- (self-evident truth 1) Your SharePoint solution isn't complete until you've measured its effectiveness.
- (self-evident truth 2) ROI is meaningless without context.
- How do you prove business value?
- ROI - ultimately, it's a method for validating / quantifying decisions. It can be treated in the wrong way though, with ROI being an after-thought.
- Typical "measures" of ROI - but these can be quite meaningless:
- ... "We updated successfully from 2007 to 2010."
- ... "The percentage of business critical documents stored in SharePoint."
- ... "Number of sites and site collections."
- Better measures:
- ... shortened business processes
- ... actual dollar savings
- How do you calculate it?
- Sarah has a great grid to show possible ROI measures - splitting between quantitative and qualitative.
- ... Money
- ... Time
- ... Emotional
- ... Evolation of Work
- ... Identify where you want to focus on the grid.
- For money:
- ... An example: We needed to build an idea generation tool. To buy a product to do this, it would cost $800,000. To build it in SharePoint and get it ready, it was $100,000. It's a pretty easy comparison.
- ... A harder example: Get products up on the website faster, therefore get more revenue. One process produced $100,000 extra revenue per year.
- For time:
- ... the base formula is: time to complete one iteration X number of iterations X hourly rate = process cost
- ... Sarah worked with Finance to get an average hourly rate for the whole of Best Buy.
- ... change the process - then do a "before process change cost" comparison to "after process change cost"
- ... an example - swapped out an issue reporting process in Excel with a SharePoint site for issue tracking. Annual savings of $135,000 per year.
- For emotional:
- ... aim is to have happier SharePoint users.
- ... eliminate the "soul crushing" work
- ... see Sue Hanley's white paper on ROI, especially the "don't take it away" factor.
- ... example: one person was spending 75% of their time copying-and-pasting time from emails to the online ticketing system. They did some automation work, and allowed people to submit tickets via a web-based form.
- For evolution of work:
- ... Making the firm a better place to work at, etc.
- ... example: replace manually created charts and graphs with automated charts in SharePoint with a Google Charting API. Made the reporting real-time.
- How do get moving on ROI?
- (1) find out what is needed - what do you value? What matters to management? What does "good" look like?
- (2) pick a focus area, and a starting point.
- (3) take a baseline measurement.
- (4) define specific success criteria.
- (5) calculate your ROI.
- (6) spread the word.
