How much does your organisation benefit from your intranet? Could you put a figure on the value it provides if asked? Probably not………..
BT’s intranet is nearly 14 years old. We measured the benefits of moving from paper to online information; the saving in accommodation costs and not having rows of cupboards with duplicated versions of policies; even the productivity savings by being able to do things quicker like looking up a phone no.
But that was over 10 years ago and the figures are not relevant now. Apart from traditional methods like return on investment, how can you measure the overall value an intranet gives?
In BT we all know our intranet gives great value. It is a business critical system. Without our intranet BT would quickly start to grind to a halt or slow to a pace of working completely unacceptable to our customers. But what value can be used to justify future investment decisions?
While some new applications and ways of communicating can start small, be beta tested, then investment justified on the benefits found, it won’t work with major infrastructure projects like content management systems, federated search engines, etc.
If anyone has the answer out there, please end your silence and tell everyone! However I suspect no one does know………..yet.
BT is working with the Intranet Benchmarking Forum (we’re a global member) to try to do just that. IBF have identified 200 business functions that can rely on intranets to be effective. BT has chosen around 20 that have the biggest impact on our organisation.
The business function owners will be interviewed over the next few weeks and the data given will be evaluated to give a figure for the overall value of our intranet that is robust and stands up to scrutiny when a business case is made for investment.
I have no idea if this will succeed but if it does, it will fill a big gap in justifying more precisely how valuable our intranet is to BT.
I’ll keep you posted on progress and the outcome if you’re interested.