Rawn Shah of IBM recently blogged that the IBM enterprise tagging social software saves IBM $4.6 million a year. Like Connectbeam, the enterprise tagging system (ETS) at IBM allows for social bookmarking within the enterprise so I was very interested to see how they developed their business case and the results they achieved. They developed their application on Dogear for their enterprise tagging service, which is a sub-component within Lotus Connections. It is deployed across their intranet as a sidebar to a number of key web properties: traditional search engine results, top content pages, and web applications. Connectbeam pioneered this sidebar display appraoch of combining bookmarked and tagged results alongside raw enterprise intranet search results. Connectbeam can do this with tools such as Sharepoint and Google Enterprise Search, External Internet Search, as well as stand on its own. Rawn wrote that the ETS team did a survey asking users how this tool helped them. They found that the average person saved 12 seconds, across the 286000+ searches performed through ETS each week. This sums up to 955 hours saved each week across the company. In terms of cost savings, it amounts to a rough estimate of $4.6 million a year, in terms of productivity gain. The system cost $700,000 to build and deploy across IBM Intranet. While it can be argued that general time savings ROIs are hard to place on a balance sheet, increased efficiency on this scale certainly needs to be respected. They also found that the reusability of the ETS page widget resulted in an additional $2.4 million in cost avoidance since it did not have to be re-implemented for each site.
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