Who the $%^&^% cares about the ROI of Enterprise 2.0?
This chart -- showing the global minutes spent per month on social media vs. e-mail and showing the inflection point in November 2007 with an ever-widening gap since then -- tells me all I need to know about the importance of calculating the ROI of Enterprise 2.0 initiatives.
In a nutshell, don't bother.
I constantly read articles about the need to calculate an ROI of Enterprise 2.0 before proceeding. Why?
Do you calculate the ROI of your e-mail system? Of course not. That's because an e-mail system is considered a core piece of infrastructure necessary to run a modern organization. (Of course, whether you want to actually
own your email system ala Exchange or run it in the cloud is, as they say in the Wizard of Oz, a Horse of a Different Color.)
E-mail is dial tone. Companies couldn't exist without it. Nobody would think about calculating its "ROI."
The adoption of social technologies in the enterprise is headed there. By the time your organization conducts one of those long-winded ROI analyses by an expensive consultant about whether to deploy social technologies, your competitors will have already done so. By then your customers will have already shifted their communications focus from email to social. By then your employees -- especially the young ones, but not only them -- will wonder what the heck you are waiting for and will have figured some way to end run the formal communications infrastructure of the organization.
Forget the ROI analysis. Before you complete the analysis, social technologies will be dial tone. Get on with it.
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#e2.0 #enterprise #2.0 #E-mail #ROI