You should be able to calculate ROI on WCM

At the AIIM show in March, the talk was all about ROI (as I wrote in "The Recession casts a long shadow over AIIM 2009 [1]"). This week, the Non-linear Creations blog [2] asks if you can really calculate the ROI of a website. The article lists four main areas to measure: Acquisition, deployment, operation and maintenance, and web experience.

I think you can calculate the ROI. A case in point was an example from last week's One on One interviewee, Molly Wenzler [3] who built a case for a new WCM by gathering key executives in a room and showing them how difficult it was to find even basic information on the old website. What's more, because of acquisitions the web properties had become a hodge podge of sites instead of one unified view of the company.

Wenzler showed the value of bringing all of the sites under a single umbrella content management system and she got her project funded. But she also looked very carefully at costs and benefits, and built metrics to measure success throughout the process:

"We kicked off a rigorous research project to build the case to redesign our site. We analyzed web usage data, we performed a competitive analysis, we interviewed customers, customer service representatives and sales consultants about their challenges and needs, and we performed usability testing and heuristic evaluations on the site."

Later when the site was in place, she continued to measure success by looking at various metrics, but she says it takes more than pure monetary measurements to measure the success of the site:

"Measuring success in purely monetary terms is a challenge, so we include visitor loyalty and visitor feedback as evidence of whether we're delivering value for the company."

As the Non-linear Creations post also points out, it's not always about money in the direct sense. If people can find things on your web site, they are going to have a better experience and have a more positive view your company and its products, but to answer the original question: Can you measure ROI on a Web Content Management system? I think you can and Molly Wenzler's experience helped prove that.

For more information:
- see the Non-linear Creations blog post [4]