Over my short career I have seen that any technology project taken to a board or management committee without sufficient financial backing is as dangerous as going for a roller coaster ride without a seat belt. One of the most critical element within the financial package is IRR or ROI part. I personal feel that finding a financial justification to most technology projects is very very difficult. For instance, in one company the Manager IS wanted to replace an older version of Maximo with a newer version, but failed to convince the board because he did not have an ROI, even though from the technology perspective it made perfect sense. All my sympathy for the person ... now this whole problem bought me to think that currently companies (in the west) are making a lot of effort to create official blogs or get involved in social networks so that they can get closer to there consumers who are actually living on the web. How does a CIO convince a board who are hungry for numbers and financial justification that they should be out there on the web interacting with there consumers in one way or the other. Li and Bernoff book, groundswell gives a very interesting insight on how to do it . According to them, blogging is a modern concept of PR relations. Many scholars over the years have tried to find ways to justify having a PR department by finical means, and a lot of them have been successful beinggirl.com being one of them. Considering, we take it as a PR tool, the following CAPEX, OPEX and value addition heads could be defined:
CAPEX:
- Web site creation this would include an agency for art works etc
- Hosting
- dedicated personnel to monitor or scan the web and promote blog
OPEX:
- annual hosting charges
Quantifiable Benefits:
- Reduction in classical PR cost
- Saving from standard research tools
- Saving from standard marketing campaigns
There is one benefit which i cant figure out how it can be quantified, and i.e. conversion of traffic to sales. Feel free to add more on the quantifiable benefits, and lets see how many heads can we make?
