New intranet software can bring many business benefits but when you are writing your business case to secure funding for your project, you need to think about how you can demonstrate your intranet return on investment (ROI). Many organisations fail to include comprehensive ROI predictions and this can lead to senior management viewing the intranet as a just another cost rather than business critical. Here are some simple ways for you to think about your ROI. If you would like to find out more about our software solution, chat with one of our intranet experts.
Intranet Return on Investment
A good place to start is to think about intranet return on investment in 3 ways: Soft benefits, hard benefits and business process improvements.
1) 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.
2) 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.
3) Business Process Improvements
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 from which you can go and start to create your own intranet return on investment proposal. To help you further you might like to download our business case guide or chat with one of our team.
