More ROI
Thursday, June 12 2008
Another great day for headlines - this one is about the great enterprise quasi-embrace of Web 2.0, and the seemingly futile exercise of applying some ROI to it. As if IT doesn't have enough work to do already. Anyway, the top line pretty much says it all...
"IT Execs Seek New Ways to Justify Web 2.0"
Usual ROI metrics won't work with new tools, users say
See here. If usual ROI metrics won't work, let's come up with some unusual ones that let us just sort of stumble into the answer we all want. As the saying goes, if you torture the numbers, they'll eventually confess. The best part of all this is that the users are chiming on how the execs should do it, that the old school approaches to measuring technology ROI don't work. It's kind of a metaphor for the Web itself, with the acumen of the masses trumping the establishment's conventional wisdom & all that stuff. Well maybe, just maybe, shortcutting process-driven communications and working more collaboratively actually is a better way to go, quantified ROI or not. Oh, never mind - you'll never get a budget approved with that kind of crazy talk. You need some ROI. This proves my theory that ROI is the 'more cowbell' of enterprise IT.
