Proven Portals: Best Practices for Planning, Designing, and Developing Enterprise Portals

Best Practices: ROI and Other Financial Impact Measures

Best practices for calculating ROI and related financial impact measures include those listed below.

• Identify a range of factors that determine the net benefit of the portal, including hard and soft estimates. Hard estimates can be quantified with clear and readily agreed-upon numbers. Factors such as printing and distribution costs and telecommunication charges are hard estimates. Soft estimates cannot be easily quantified and are strongly biased by best guesses and intuition. These include the effects of improved productivity, better decision making, and collaboration on improved sales and operations.

• Use a range of estimates such as likely, worst-case, and best-case scenarios. In likely ...