IBM have recently published an ROI study about their own internal use of instant messaging. I was initially quite excited about this, I am a huge instant messaging fan, and sometimes I think the fact that it seems like such a no-brainer to me in terms of corporate use I struggle to articluate why people should use it (almost like having to justify why phones are useful for businesses).

I was somewhat disappointed with their report. They reckon they have saved $16.5m per year “in phone usage alone“. This is based on 380,000 users, 200,000 concurrent users and 4 million messages sent per day. They then estimate the number of times instant messaging is used instead of the phone, the average number of minutes per call and the phone rate.

So far, so good. But then we get the following which have also “factored into the calculation”:

• Quick access to expertise
• Allow more employees to go mobile

And further cost savings are available from “the cost benefits of high productivity”.

How did IBM measure the benefit of quick access to expertise and allowing employees to go mobile in a way that they managed to combine it into the $16.5m number? How would they go about measuring high producitivity? These are the really interesting metrics, measuring usage of instant messaging at the expense of phones is relatively easy and straightforward, but positions the corporate use of instant messaging firmly as a cost saver.

Now, from a sales point of view this may be the best way to get instant messaging into an organisation and past the CFO, but I am convinced that instant messaging can help generate revenue. For example:

• Did quick access to expertise allow IBM to get the right subject matter expert to contribute to a proposal which led them to win a multi-million dollar contract they would have otherwise lost?
• Did allowing employees to go mobile increase sales face time with customers by x% resulting in $y extra revenue?

This revenue generating activity is how instant messaging can help an organisation which embraces it fully (which I know that IBM does!) but is also where examples of ROI are sorely lacking. It would have been great if IBM could have provided some insight here, even if they were isolated examples rather than figures that could be applied across different industries.