Aug
I have always found return on investment (ROI) to be a very elusive subject. Business people want to know how much revenue their investments are producing. In the federated search world, vendors want to be able to help their customers to measure their ROI. But, most of what I’ve ever heard related to ROI has been statements like “our technology will help you save time, it’ll save you money, it’ll minimize the chance that you’ll miss important documents, and we won’t fill your results list with junk.” How do you translate those vague statements into something you can measure?
Judy Luther, President of Informed Strategies, and a judge for out federated search writing contest, tackles the question of measuring ROI. She has authored an Elsevier Library Connect white paper, University investment in the library: What’s the return? A case study at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The white paper presents an interesting approach to measuring ROI in an academic library. The approach presented may or may not work in other environments.
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