In our discussion of and excerpting from our recent report, “2011 Unified Communications and Cloud-Based Services Report”, we mentioned last time that qualitatively if a Knowledge worker could recover just 25% of their “overhead” time by use of UC, then this could save about six weeks per year in lost productivity.
So the next task was to attempt to turn this data into “real dollars.”
Enterprise Cloud Services: The agenda
To do this, we attempted to quantify the savings for a prototypical company with 50 Knowledge Workers. Of the 50 Knowledge Workers, we assumed a wide range of salaries ranging from $40,000 per year to $110,000 per year, with the number of employees weighted to the less expensive employees. We also assumed modest productivity gains of two hours per day by weighting the expected increases in efficiency by implementing UC in each of four categories.
Based on these relatively conservative assumptions, the prototypical company with 50 Knowledge Workers is able to recover a time value of roughly $1 million per year ($942,500 to be exact) in increased productivity.
But there’s a catch here. The typical SMB, which is the focus of the report, does not have the staff and expertise to accomplish this easily. In fact, the amount of IT support per Knowledge Worker in a SMB is exponentially higher than it is in a larger enterprise.
Which leads us to the importance of cloud-based services. The best method, and perhaps the only method, for SMBs to turn this incredible time value and increased productivity into “real” dollars with a significant ROI is by the use of cloud-based services.
By the way, if you would like to use our work on UC savings as a template for your own set of assumptions, our calculations are shown in detail in an appendix in the report.
