Is measuring intranet ROI a waste of time?

Intranet managers have always struggled when trying to demonstrate the value of the intranet to senior managers. Although it’s clear that the intranet does bring significant benefits, pin-pointing those benefits and putting a value to them requires complex models and plenty of hypothesis. Senior managers generally accept that intranets deliver value but are often incredulous when presented with ROI estimates. Quantifying the benefit in monetary terms can therefore be a wasted effort. Far better instead to give them a cost-per-user-per-year. It’s a metric that fairly easy and quick to measure. When senior managers see that the investment per user is often less than that of a magazine subscription (especially with intranets targeting a large audience), the benefit delivered seems to matter less to them.