And then, like a 40 watt bulb flickering to life I had an epiphany. Given that calculating the ROI of the squishy stuff is really really really hard, and generally it's the squishy stuff that's the most important (more engagement, better communication, accelerated innovation, more reuse of existing information, talent retention, productivity increase, etc), then why not use a tool that seems ideally geared towards arriving at a close approximation of reality without needing or being able to measure directly? I am, of course, talking about crowd wisdom.
Here's how it could work:
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Implement your hard-to-measure-the-ROI-of initiative (for example, redesign your intranet to be more usable, or implement social bookmarking, or an internal blogosphere, or whatever)
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Set up a mechanism to aggregate the wisdom of the crowd - maybe a prediction market (although aren't they usually associated with events that have a measurable outcome such as "Who will be the next President", "Who will win the World Cup, etc" ?). Maybe all that's needed is a simple survey asking people how much they thought had been saved, or how much extra revenue earned.
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Add and divide, and obtain average. I'm sure there are plenty of slightly more rigorous statistical techniques here for processing the numbers (eg throwing away outliers, etc), but essentially, that's it.
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The hard part is now trying to work out whether that number bears any actual resemblance to reality - but maybe that's easier to judge when there's a number in front of you.
I admit that this doesn't let you know the ROI up front (would that be worthwhile, asking employees to predict the ROI before implementing ? Is that too complicated a question to ask ?), but it might give you some justification of impact.
What do you think ? Stupid idea, or just impractical ?
[tags]ROI, measurement, fuzzy, squishy, metrics, aggregation, crowdwisdom, wisdomofcrowds, predictionmarkets[/tags]
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