Calculating Intranet Return on investment is a task that has been made more difficult than it should be and often underestimated. Showing the true value of a new intranet is essential when pitching for additional budget to demonstrate just why it’s business critical. Here are some simple ways in which you can evaluate your intranet platform ROI. You might also like to download our business case guide for further insight.
A good place to start is to think about Intranet ROI in 3 ways: Soft benefits, hard benefits and business process improvements.
Intranet Soft Benefits:
These benefits are the intangible benefits that everyone benefits from and it’s important to highlight the intranet as being the driver. Soft benefits can include things such as reducing the email culture within your organisation. Clients regularly cite this as a major benefit that is quickly realised, once the organisation starts to realise the intranet is the place for a lot of the content traditionally emailed.
Organisations also often experience an increase in their productivity as employees are collaborating more, sharing ideas and become more engaged and enthusiastic about the organisation.
Intranet Hard Benefits:
Hard benefits are those that can organisations can place a value against and are often tangible. Organisations often experience:
•Reductions in paper and printing costs
•Reductions in hardware and software
•Reduced time to market
•Fewer headcount, redistribution of staff
•Increased sales revenue
Each organisation will be able to monetise different hard measures, given the nature of their business. Using e-bulletins for example saved one company over £12,000 a year in printing costs, whilst another organisation saved £5000 a month by simply centralising their stationery procurement.
Finally, Business process improvements are also the result of a successful intranet. Organisations find new ways of working and working better and smarter. Some organisations may align their intranet with their business from the outset, whilst other organisations find new ways of working as a result of the intranet functionality.
If you are already shopping around for intranet options, it might be worth engaging your potential suppliers at this stage to see if they can offer support in helping you complete this critical stage of your business case.
I hope this has given you a starting point to help you create your own ROI. To help you further, you can download the SORCE Business Case Guide.