Building a Web Content Management Business Case Part 2 of 3

One of the questions that we are often asked by our prospects is ‘how do I build a business case to support the purchase of a Web Content Management system?’ Here is a three part series on one method that could be employed. The first metric that we looked at was Revenue. The second metric that logically follows is to evaluate Cost.

Cost, productivity and headcount savings are critical measures to include in a business case as they tend to be the highest valued metrics within the organization. Everyone loves revenue projections, but skeptical management, particularly with a background in IT, is naturally going to gravitate towards cost savings as a more reliable and achievable metric.

Will a new Web Content Management system result in cost savings? You betcha. Here are several easily quantifiable data points to consider:

1. A better site, operating in an infrastructure with a single stack will be less expensive because it will require fewer resources and less expensive resources to maintain. This measurement is relevant if you are operating today with many disparate systems that are cobbled together. You lose productivity because experts in one system may not be able to provide support in another, so you have to have more resources with different specialties. The more systems that are in use, the more complex the environment and therefore, the more expensive the IT resources that will be required to maintain it. A simple system with a single architecture will be less expensive. Period.

2. A better site will reduce costs in customer support because it will empower users with more customer self-service capabilities via the web site. This measurement speaks to the ability for customers and partners to be able to open, track, update and close trouble tickets via the web, as opposed to calling a call center and speaking to a customer support rep to log a ticket. This is just one example of how customer self-service can reduce costs and you may have other examples that make the metric even more compelling.

3. A better site will be less expensive because the time and brain-power to manage integration points with other software will be reduced due to a common platform. This measurement is very real and often overlooked when preparing a business case. If you have three content management systems and you purchase lead management software or a CRM system, you will need to integrate those purchases with each of your content management systems. That is expensive, time-consuming and can lead to costly mistakes. You don’t want to be the company who loses web leads because the integration point with your lead management platform broke down and took weeks to discover.

4. A better site will be less expensive due to automated content expiration and triggering updates via workflow, rather than manually auditing content (or not auditing at all). This measurement could be a ‘soft’ cost unless you have headcount dedicated to auditing your site. But the value is critical. With a web content management system, you can design workflow that alerts a business owner that their content is stale and due for a refresh. You can also establish business rules that ‘expire’ content automatically after an event or a certain time period has passed. The value of this can easily be under-stated because the cost of old, tired content reflects poorly on the whole customer experience.

5. A better infrastructure will allow users to create smaller content units that can be stored and re-used beyond the web site. This item speaks to the heart of the web content management value proposition. How many places do you save your key messaging? And when it is updated, how many places do you have to make that change to ensure it is reflected across the board? We have great customer stories where the re-use of content units is done remarkably well. Key messaging points are saved in the web content management platform and fed to the web site and data sheets and event descriptions from a single source. So when the messaging changes, with one update, so do all of the impacted assets. This too can be hard to quantify, but if you look at the hours and cost involved in creating collateral and you consider how much content re-use would reduce that time, you should be able to create a defensible cost savings number.

These five metrics will apply to most organizations, but there are other measures that might apply to your Web Content Management business case as well. If you are hosting the site externally, or paying a 3rd party to manage or monitor your site, or if you have out-sourced translations or localization issues, these costs can contribute as well. The best place to start is to review your P&L or your historical POs. Where are you spending money to support your web site? Could those costs be reduced with a web content management system that was easy to maintain, update, audit and integrate? My guess is that you will say “You betcha!” and be able to build a compelling business case based on significant cost savings.

Our final installation in this series will discuss the strategic goals and how to incorporate those into your business case. Stay tuned…