I’m really growing to like Gil Yehuda’s blog. I caught this post this morning about claiming more of an ROI than you sould…

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 issimplistic 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.

Awesome point, and in this current econolypse, everyone wants to talk about ROIs, and sometimes goes too far out on a limb. Later on in the article, Gil explains how Yammer posted that Forrester saved $10,000 a month using their application.  Can’t blame them for trying, but boy that was a stretch.

Made me think about work that VoiceSage has done in the past proving the ROI of Communications Enabled Business Process (CEBP) to their customers.  In one story I heard, they were working with a publisher of home shopping catalogs, and to prove the ROI, they made reminder calls to the customers in one geographical area, and not to others. (Perhaps they ran it for one month to all customers, then turned it off for a month, but whatever.)  Then, they could measure the returns based on zip code.  This is a process that could be repeated at will, and ROI was easily determined. No stretching required.