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RSS ROI

Think Outside The Feed | MySmartChannels

Although not scientific, here's a simple ROI for one use case of RSS.
Imagine you're a marketing director for a large firm. Each morning you must log into the corporate portal and review information concerning your job. By virtue of very specific processes devloped through your manager and the IT administrator of the portal, there are seven pages that will contain the information that you should be focusing on at least once a day - preferably three times a day.

Assume this task takes approximately 14 minutes (about 2 minutes per page). Also assume the navigation requires constitutes about 2 minutes of the total time and includes login. This represents about 500 minutes per year (navigating) assuming a 50 week work-year (subtract 40 minutes if you live in Europe, and 80 minutes if you live in Australia ;-).

This fictional director of marketing spend a little over 8 hours a year navigating to these seven pages to SEE if anything has changed.

Now compound this resource expenditure by factoring in the time spent reading a page to see if it has changed. Assume that on average three of the seven pages change only a few times a week and that it takes about a minute to detect if a page has changed. In this unscientific example, the director of marketing spends another 450 minutes a year (3 pages x 1 minute x 3 days per week without change).

The total time - about 16 hours per year.

Imagine an RSS-based solution where the newsreader is recieveing a list of only the changes on these pages and does so every hour. Not only have you eliminated the time you spend looking at a page to see if it has changed, you eliminate the navigation time while accelerating the awareness.

For a single employee this seems insignificant, and there are certainly costs associated with acquiring the reader technology, engineering the feeds, and training of course. However, in a 1,000 person company, it starts to add up (1000 x 16 = 16,000 person hours of savings per year). At a very modest $20/hour office worker salary, you can buy a lot of technology for $320,000. And this is example only includes one very small slice of the office worker's information diet. Factor in the portal visits to HR and the many other information sources that employees are expected to stay abreast of, and you have a recipe for widespread productivity enhancement.

Where's the money? It's hiding in all the pennies spent finding stuff instead of stuff finding you.

September 7, 2004 at 08:09 AM in Blogging & feeds | Permalink | TrackBack (2) | Top of page | Blog Home