Re: Re: CMS ROI?

Yes John, in my view you are correct in suggesting that the true 
determination of the ROI on a CMS project, a priori at any rate, is
essentialy impossible. Although we sales guys might wish it otherwise,
some investments simply do not permit of a simplistic arithmetic
rationale which can magically burst open the corporate coffers every
time
and the fact is that CMS is one of those. That said, the same is true of
all
sorts of other major corporate investements made daily such as
advertising campaigns, corporate training programmes etc. etc. the value
of which can only be "guesstimated" after the fact and which success or
otherwise will always be difficult to seperate out from the universe of
all other ever-changing variables.

In my time selling ECMS, the fact that I have yet to find a simple
spread sheet approach that might legitimately persuade "every
bean-counter in my way" remains the single biggest challenge of my job.
And so I'm always interested to see such "tools" as that presented
earlier by Steve of Red Dot. It seems to me however that the very nature
of CMS is such that any ROI material out there (at least any I've
encountered) is either not very tangible or not very credible. In other
words, the arguments tend to be typically either 1) too "fluffy" and
rely on words rather than numbers, or else 2) are too rigid and involve
a "spreadsheet" approach based on extremely dubious assumptions and
ignoring very many less measurable variables. Such is the nature of the
beast it seems.

So John, good luck in finding the Holy Grail of the CMS ROI. And if you
do get lucky, please please mail me privately ? :)

p.s this is one of the least silly pieces I found on the topic, albeit a
while ago:

http://www.cmswatch.com/Features/TopicWatch/FeaturedTopic/?feature_id=67

All the best,

Conor Saunders 

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