Measuring Return on Investment for Content Management

Automating content management is one of the portal initiatives with the highest return on investment. While portal content does not necessarily bring revenue in the door like the commerce section of a portal, organizations with large, complex web sites spend a great deal of time and money on maintaining that content, and a content management system (CMS) can result in significant cost savings.

The first value in the equation is to determine how much you are already spending on content management. How many hours of your web team's time are spent on creating or editing content? Is your webmaster responsible for fixing typographical errors in content? What is the cost of this time? What is the hourly rate or salary for the people engaged in content management? Don't forget to include the time of content authors who submit items to be posted on the web site. How much time do they spend on this activity?

Next, what is the lag time in posting content, from authoring to going live? The delay is often significant because the web team can be a bottleneck that slows down the process of updating and adding content. What is the value of more timely updates to your web site? Would improved communication on the web site increase customer satisfaction or make other constituents happier ? How much would that improvement be worth to you?

Now calculate the cost of implementing a content management system. What would be the cost for hardware, software, maintenance, implementation, and conversion services? Over how many years should the investment be amortized?

This return on investment exercise may be enough to interest management in the development of your portal. By adding content management capabilities, you can significantly increase the growth of portal content, thereby leading to higher use of the portal.