In Search of ROI
I once joked with a boss of mine that everything bought and sold by businesses can be boiled down to having just one of two benefits—it either saves you money or makes you money. Last Monday, I was reminded of this conversation while sitting on a panel, “Enterprise Search: Running Your Own Search Engine”, with a few other folks at the Search Engine Strategies Conference in San Jose. One of the panelists, Bill French, CTO from Myst Technology Partners, brought up statistics from IDC in his presentation, observing that employees may spend up to two hours a day searching for information, to illustrate the point of why enterprise search is so critical. Now these are not new numbers, they are the same figures that everyone in the industry has bandied about for quite some time as the reason d’etre for search—if enterprise search solutions can save each employee x amount of time, then multiply x by y (employee hourly salary) to get the theoretical dollar savings per employee search can provide. This is the “saves you money” argument.
The problem is, I’m not sure it is a very persuasive argument. Sure, with effective search, employees will save time. No doubt about it. The question is—what will they do with the extra time? Will they use it to do work that is more productive for the company or will they take a longer lunch or go home a bit earlier? These are the questions a fiscally prudent CFO or other senior executive would ask before signing off on an enterprise search platform when presented with an ROI justification that is calculated on employee productivity.
A more compelling argument for search is to think about the latter argument, the “makes you money” one. Here at Vivisimo we spend a lot of time listening to our customers talk about not only finding information via search, but also taking action on it—sharing found information with others, adding knowledge to previous works and building off existing information by using the collaborative social search features in our platform. And we hear them talk about search discovery—finding information they didn’t know was even there—information that can help bring products to market faster, make their companies more competitive, etc. These are value propositions for enterprise search that go well beyond an ROI based on reducing the bottom line to an ROI based upon adding more to the top line.
What do you think the most compelling ROI for search is?
Tags: employee productivity, enterprise search, IDC, ROI, Search Engine Strategies, social search
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