* A distinct benefit of IM and collaboration tools is that they can reduce delays
Part of the difficulty in justifying new tools in an enterprise is that often they do not result in benefits that are “felt” by the enterprise in a financial sense. Similarly, the absence of a tool or capability wouldn’t result in any discernible financial harm to the enterprise. That said, significant benefits can be realized by the use of instant messaging, presence and collaborative technologies, even if those benefits are hard to identify.
In “An Empirical Study of Global Software Development: Distance and Speed” – a research paper written by folks at Lucent, the University of Michigan and Xerox PARC – the authors discuss the results of their research into problems caused when people who must work together are separated geographically.
An interesting finding from the study came from questioning professionals, mostly software engineers, about delays in their work caused by the need for information from other people. The study found that when these people needed information from others at local sites, there was an average of 2.1 delays per month, and the average length of delay was 0.9 days. However, when they needed information from others at geographically separate sites, the mean number of delays was 1.9 per month with an average length of 2.4 days. In other words, there were 1.9 local delay-days per month when needing information from others at the same site, but 4.6 delay-days per month when the information was needed from people who were geographically separated, a difference of more than 140%.
The key takeaway here is that distance imposes delays in gathering information from others. These delays might manifest themselves in slower response to a customer inquiry, delayed introduction of a new product, deletion of certain product features from a new release if the deadline for the release is unchangeable, and other problems. None of these are issues that are necessarily going to create a clear and quantifiable financial impact in and of themselves, but they will result in an impact on the bottom line at some point.
Instant messaging, presence and collaborative technologies can go a long way toward reducing delays, particularly in geographically distributed organizations, and they can make teams more efficient. While there may not be a mechanism in place to gauge the financial impact of these tools – creating difficulty in establishing an ROI calculation for them – they can add significantly to the bottom line for most organizations.
