Re: ROI links

I'm not convinced ROI is an especially valid metric, even if it does
resonate owing to it's popularity.

Calculating return on investment is a backward looking process, which is
valid for the future only when the market is stable (e.g., you wouldn't
loose visitors to competitor sites if you did nothing.)   ROI assumes a
tightly coupled relationship between usability expenditure and some
accounting category such as sales or costs, when such a relationship is
often indirect at best, with an indeterminate time lag.

Cost justifying usability is but one aspect of the wider topic of cost
justifying IT in general.  How to measure productivity, or bottom line
results?  This is a foggy area, and I'm sure one could poke holes in most
any calculation if one exercised a critical mindset.

I'm more inspired by the emergence of the "Balanced Scorecard" as an
approach to measuring business benefits and capabilities.  This approach is
being adopted in many areas of IT, including even fuzzier areas like
corporate knowledge management programs, and is gaining some acceptance in
the investment community for reflecting more comprehensively where a firm is
heading.   The Balanced Scorecard is a holistic approach to measurement,
which looks at a business from a systems perspective, looking at learning,
internal process, customers, as well as financials.  I believe this approach
could be well suited to discussing the benefits of usability to a firm.

Michael Andrews

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