Beyond RoI – An alternative solution.....

04 November 2009, 3:03pm

Beyond RoI – An alternative solution for measuring benefits of GIS Jonathan Marshall recently presented a paper at the AGI annual conference. His speech presented a method developed for use within British Waterways and derived from accepted academic theory for measuring ‘intangibles’. The scorecard approach developed is both flexible and easily tailored to include measures and metrics of importance at a project, programme or organisation level for measuring and articulating benefits of GI.

Within British Waterways (BW) and the geographic information (GI) industry at large identifying and measuring the benefits that GI brings has been and continues to be a challenge. Measuring the benefit of geographic information systems (GIS) is an increasingly important trend, one reinforced further by the current economic climate. There is a lack of recognised measures of benefit commonly used across organisations (either private or public) and most studies in this area have concentrated on solely financial measures. These demonstrate a reliance on the Return on Investment model, the identification of quantitative financial benefits and ways to create a financial measure for qualitative benefits. Many people and organisations in the GI industry often cite the difficulty of calculating a measure for intangible benefits as a barrier to both progress and investment. In BW this has resulted in difficulties gaining authorisation for GIS projects and challenges in the recognition of the importance of location information and the GIS Specialists working within the business.

The difficulty of establishing a financial element to all benefits for inclusion within the RoI calculation typically used can be both time consuming and costly in its own right. While the financial RoI element is important, there is also the need to easily measure and include non-financial elements like alignment to vision and objectives, user satisfaction, customer service, etc.

This paper presents a method developed for use within British Waterways and derived from accepted academic theory for measuring ‘intangibles’. The scorecard approach developed is both flexible and easily tailored to include measures and metrics of importance at a project, programme or organisation level for measuring and articulating benefits of GI.

GeoConnexion UK presented an abstract of the paper in this Nov/Dec issue within the Executive Suite Section of the magazine Page 39. Read below the full paper.

britishwaterways.co.uk

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The Executive Suite Nov/Dec Issue - GeoUK

The Executive Suite Sep/Oct Issue - GeoUK

The Executive Suite Jun/July Issue - GeoUK

Jonathan E Marshall

GIS Manager, British Waterway