E20 in Pfizer: why a ROI when there is anecdotal evidence ?

clipped from internetevolution.com

Despite Pfizer’s investment in social networking tools, Biersach says it’s all but impossible to calculate ROI. Instead, he measures value by gauging how much the company’s social networking applications entwine themselves into employees’ daily work lives until they can’t imagine living without them.

Like EMC, Pfizer measures the number of users and the frequency of use. Out of 98,000 employees, 63,000 are regular SharePoint users, and the company has more than 6,000 active SharePoint sites. […]

Another measure of the value of social networking apps is by the number of other applications that can be linked to them in ways that enhance productivity. Pfizer is considering using Web services calls between SharePoint and its Siebel CRM applications to post a daily list of sales calls on salespeople’s SharePoint MySite profile pages. “A system that’s highly integrated into other systems is indicative of high value,” Biersach says.

Another way to measure the value of social networking tools “is to relate them to process improvements rather than time savings or loose efficiency gains,” Biersach says. For instance, Pfizer’s IT department created a wiki where users can search for solutions to common laptop and desktop problems instead of calling the help desk. While Biersach doesn’t have hard data to quantify the reduction in help-desk tickets because of the wiki, he knows people are using it, and he has anecdotal evidence that they’ve resolved problems without having to open a ticket. […]