I think someone needs to change his ROI model.

A few weeks ago I posted a personal success story about how microsharing behaviors provided value to me when I was working at my last company.  We were experimenting with tools — at one point, Yammer.  I used to run a monthly meeting with a large team of analysts.  We agreed to stop meeting and instead create a Yammer group so that we could share the information with each other on an as-needed basis rather than once a month.

In analyzing the conversations that lead to the decision to try this out, we observed that since we were billable resources, we could quantify the cost of our time.  Given the number of analysts that attended this meeting and the billing rates we charge — we were in the $10,000 ballpark for that one hour.  In other words — had we all been at clients for that time, we could have billed $10K during that hour.  Of course, we don’t bill clients every moment of the day, and despite the quote “Time is Money” — it’s not.  So I used the statement “It might be simplistic to say that we saved $10,000 a month using Yammer. ”  And I meant “it is simplistic to say…” that we saved $10K a month using Yammer. OK, yes I did say “But in some way it’s a reasonable way to measure the value that open microsharing brought to the company.”  Did I go too far on the limb with a statement of simplistic ROI as a measure of value?  I think I went as far as I was willing to go, but no further.

I was amused to see that Yammer was so pleased with the success of our experiment that they posted “Yammer Enables Fewer Meetings – Saves Forrester $10,000 a Month“ their forums. [Note June 8, 2009: they even had the chutzpa of crafting a case study with my picture and former employer's details, with neither of our permission.] [Note: June 10, 2009  They took down the link to the case study.  Thanks you.  I still see the PDF though, I'm sure they will take that down soon.] But, this an overstatement — and one that I think took too much liberty from my post.  First of all, I purposely avoided mentioning Forrester.  I don’t speak on their behalf.  As much as I admire the company and the people I worked with there — I’ll let them decide who to endorse, if anyone.   Secondly, my post diminished the ROI claim as being “simplistic”.  Thirdly, although we eliminated the monthly meeting — I’m still on the fence about idea of replacing meetings with Yammer groups.  Some conversations must take place in voice.  So even if we eliminated a meeting — this does not mean that the quality of communication was the same.  But I understand the desire on the part of Yammer to leverage my story.  After all, I did get benefit using their product.
So let me draw an analogy using the same simplistic ROI calculations in the following spoof:

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Adult Diapers Enables Fewer Meetings – Saves Company $10,000 a Month

In response to the recent economic downturn, we have decided to provide all analysts who cover Web 2.0 and Social Media technologies with adult diapers.  By using adult diapers we can reduce the number of times that analysts take bathroom breaks during the day.  According to our calculations, the average bathroom break takes 4 minutes.  By eliminating (no pun intended) 30 bathroom breaks a day for each of the 20 working days per month, multiplied by the number of analysts in this group and their billing rate, we estimate that we can save $10,000 a month.  Please note: the person in this photo is not a famous Forrester analyst who let his beard grow long.

Will this cost-savings measure improve our business more than Yammer did?  It Depends!

Tagged as: Enterprise 2.0, spoof, success story, workplace