British Waterways implemented an enterprise GIS solution in 2001 to provide information about its waterway network assets and environment. It struggled to measure the benefits of GIS beyond financial return on investment calculations. It developed a simple scorecard approach with measures across key areas like customers, internal processes, and learning, without relating everything back to financial values. This balanced approach using existing measurable metrics avoided complex tasks to establish financial values for intangible benefits and allowed progress to be easily tracked against targets.
Jonathan Marshall: Beyond RoI – An alternative solution for measuring benefits of GIS
1. Beyond RoI – An alternative solution for measuring benefits of GIS Jonathan Marshall When you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind... Lord Kelvin
14. BW’s Solution All measures are either currently being measured or not onerous to undertake – e.g. user satisfaction easily measured through a user survey Target values are either in BW’s corporate plan or where possible are recognised industry figures.
What is measurement? - well both are right, its just the first one is very difficult to do and from a business perspective the second is much more practical. The fact some error is unavoidable but that the result is an improvement on previous knowledge is still of benefit. Why measure? Loads of reasons, that I think most know about and accept, there have been many previous presentations over the last few years explaining the importance and need to measure benefits of GI Not just GI industry - Independent survey, 40% fail to measure IT’s contribution to business. This failure is severely impacting the value being derived from their IT infrastructure. It is also noted that few orgs have developed ways to measure the value IT contributes.
This issue is highlighted by CIMA (2002) which shows that where factors are difficult to measure the temptation is to avoid them. Myers (2004) also highlighted that a common argument against devoting resources to measuring the financial benefit generated from IT projects was that it is difficult. Everything can be measured in a financial sense it just takes more time, energy and imagination to find the appropriate measure. As Gillespie (2000 p7) noted, “converting from qualitative to quantitative benefits measurement can easily double or triple the cost of a costs/benefits study.”
RoI – harder to implement than formula suggests In a paper by Estes (Estes, J. M. (2007) ROI: Measuring the real return [online] ) – it is suggested that most execs say RoI can be measured but admit they don’t know how to actually do it!
RoI – harder to implement than formula suggests In a paper by Estes (Estes, J. M. (2007) ROI: Measuring the real return [online] ) – it is suggested that most execs say RoI can be measured but admit they don’t know how to actually do it!
Many frameworks and techniques exist – some specifically attempt to address the challenge of measuring or incorporating intangibles into the metrics: Benchmarking, Six Sigma, Value-based mgt, Balanced Scorecard, Performance Prism, Intangible Asset Monitor, etc.
Many frameworks and techniques exist – some specifically attempt to address the challenge of measuring or incorporating intangibles into the metrics: Benchmarking, Six Sigma, Value-based mgt, Balanced Scorecard, Performance Prism, Intangible Asset Monitor, etc.