dimensions to the value of my work

November 5 2010, 4:21 PM  by Wolf Cramer
I feel fortunate to have had opportunities in 2010 to work on interesting and important efforts.  Reflecting on the year, it seems the primary theme of my work in 2010 was around leveraging technology and innovation in support of sales efforts as well as IBM's CIO organization.  

All this innovation and exploration sounds good but what does it translate into in terms of business value for my organization and for IBM.  The value of innovation and trying new approaches can have financial and traceable measurements.... BUT I believe the largest value comes from the intangibles and difficult to measure elements of innovation.  How should I communicate or quantify the value of my personal contributions into something meaningful for my management?

Here's my attempt to capture a few important dimensions of value and key questions for each that hopefully span both the tangible and intangible with respect to the work I've done:

  • Hard benefits - Did my efforts lead to new revenue, increased sales, cost savings (such as sunsets)?
  • Soft benefits - How did my efforts lead to productivity improvements and cost avoidance?  Are the calculations and underlying assumptions around quantifying these 'soft' benefits reasonable?
  • Brand building -  How did my actions contribute to IBM's brand image in the marketplace?
    • Knowledge sharing - Did I share details on some of the efforts and lessons learned both internally and externally so as to help others achieve value faster in the future?
    • Corporate Social Responsibility - Did any of my work contribute to improving our world and communities we operate in?
  • Intangibles - What other strategic dimensions of my work were important?
    • Innovation - How did my efforts lead to creative and new approaches to business challenges?
    • Influence - Did my efforts demonstrate thought leadership and help to influence the strategies and efforts of other teams? 
    • Collaboration - Are there examples where I worked to collaborate with other teams to find reuse opportunities and develop win-win situations?
What about you?  What are your favorite ways to communicate business value beyond traditional financial measurements?

Tags

benefits, collaboration, metrics, roi, tangible

924 views and 3 responses

  • Dec 16 2010, 3:41 AM
    Marcio Domene responded:
    Wolf, I have a hard time to find a way to measure and communicate innovation.

    I foster innovation among 600 engineers to bring new solutions and new technologies. In my last company I used to measure patents issued (that are easy to show everyone and to measure the income from royalties and the like), but many innovations does not turn into patents and count ideas on the suggestion box are not the way I feel comfortable to show results (they are not results, they are pieces of the process).
    If we talk about new product or new solution that are not part of the regular company portfolio, sales people does not know how to sell it, and are not interested in risk their bonus to a unkonw result product/solution.

    I am starting in a new company next January and I need to find a way to measure my work, but I don't have the company tradition and backlog that most employees have acquired to know what counts positively and what doesn't to create a measure scale.

    Any thoughts? Any articles to point to regarding innovation measurment?

    Thanks for your post!

  • Dec 16 2010, 2:16 PM
    Wolf Cramer responded:
    Well, the innovation space can be a tricky one for quantifying value in traditional ways. You can find lots of different studies and thoughts through google searches or even twitter searches (http://twitter.com/#!/search/innovation%20metrics).

    Personally I like to understand how many innovations 'grow up' and get beyond the prototype / pilot stages. This might include something like number of innovations transferred / migrated to another team or part of the business.

    I also think gathering what i like to call emotional data on innovations can be useful for making decisions about whether to grow/kill an innovation. This might be gathered through surveys of early adopters asking stuff like whether they have shared / talked about the innovation, whether its fun to use, scratches an unknown itch, etc.

    In the end, regardless of the metrics selected, I think its important to understand the consumer of the metrics and what they are looking for. Are they risk tolerant? Are they concerned about competitive advantage? Sometimes the best metric can be giving insight to opportunity costs if no actions are taken.

    Hope that helps.

  • Dec 17 2010, 4:28 AM
    Marcio Domene responded:
    Wolf, thanks for your input. I need to know the consumer of the metrics and what they are looking for. Since I will start at this job in January, I really don't know my consumer of the metrics. But, anyway your comment was valuable for my planning.

    Thanks and have a happy Christmas!
    Marcio