IT Execs Seek New Ways to Justify Web 2.0

Computerworld - William Hayes is working on a pilot project that he hopes will eventually bring wikis, blogs and RSS technologies to employees throughout Cambridge, Mass.-based pharmaceutical company Biogen Idec Inc.

But Hayes, Biogen Idecs associate director of library and literature informatics, knows that proving the worth of such Web 2.0 tools to senior management will be difficult using traditional return on investment metrics.

The ROI is going to be qualitative for us, Hayes said. If it improves interactivity and were getting usage of the tools and there is better communications in the company, then we will consider it a success.

As part of the pilot project, Hayes and his team are creating a wiki to house content generated from research requests, along with feedback on that research. The plan also calls for using NewsGator Technologies Inc.s RSS server to provide Biogen Idecs researchers with feeds anytime new information about a particular drug is posted online, Hayes said.

He noted that the group is eschewing some traditional paths of gaining management approval for the project  for example, it has opted not to require formal sign-offs from executives in each unit that is expected to use the new tools.

Typically, technologies move forward only if there is a huge driver, or an executive vice president or better who really wants something to happen, Hayes said. But, he added, we can essentially do [Web 2.0 projects] in somewhat stealth mode as pilots and prototypes. Its a lot easier to roll things out in a small fashion and allow them to grow in a grass-roots way.

Oliver Young, an analyst at Forrester Research Inc., contended that the difficulty of proving the financial worth of Web 2.0 tools to top executives is the biggest roadblock to corporate use of the technology.

You are immediately stacked up against everything else IT has to deal with, he said. Suddenly, all these other initiatives that generally do have good ROI models associated with them become the benchmark.

According to a report released in June, 63% of 275 IT managers surveyed by Forrester were still using traditional ROI benchmarks, such as total cost of ownership, to measure the value of Web 2.0 tools to their companies.

Another 14% of the respondents said they had not yet attempted to assess the value of Web 2.0 tools at all, though Forrester analysts believe that a considerably higher percentage of companies are failing in their efforts to evaluate the technologys ROI.