All in Cost Analysis

I was interviewed yesterday by a Forrester Research staff member about how CIO’s (Chief information Officers) should approach the implementation of collaboration tools (click here for a list of blog posts related to “collaboration”). We talked about the usual adoption issues related to “web 2.0” applications within the enterprise.
Given the difficulty of doing Return on Investment (ROI) analysis for IT projects, how do you justify an Enterprise Web 2.0 project? In a comment he left on my How Much Will Your Enterprise Web 2.0 Project Cost? post, Vinnie Mirchandani suggested that one place to start would be to look at the criteria used in the past for evaluating large IT investments.
When considering the potential system integration costs of an enterprise web 2.0 project, one of the first things to do is to identify potential system-related “ripple effects” (if any) of introducing an enterprise web 2.0 system into the organization. We also need to consider the cost implications of addressing and managing these ripple effects over time.
Professor Andrew McAfee has an excellent series of posts related to the application of “return on investment” (ROI) calculations to enterprise IT. His posts deserve a close reading. He gets some flack for seeming to argue against measurement, but as he explains in his second post, that’s not his point; he’s basically saying that too many business cases that rely on a haphazard or incomplete calculation of IT benefits are flawed, incorrect, incomplete, or self serving.