A famous, much-beloved old cartoon depicts the implementation of a child's backyard swing as envisioned by the project sponsor, as implemented by the computer programmers and finally, as actually installed.
Of course all are completely dysfunctional contraptions, when what the user really wanted was a tire hanging from a rope.
The lasting appeal of this copyrighted image (www.robelle.com/ library/smugbook/tree.gif) speaks volumes about the thorny problem of measuring the business value of technology projects.
According to Jack Keen and Bonnie Dirguis, authors of Making Technology Investments Profitable, "over 50 per cent of all information technology projects fail.”
Other studies say 30 per cent. Or 70 per cent. That's the problem, nobody really knows how to quantify the business value of a tech project, or even whether to celebrate success or mourn failure.
Enter Telus Corp., Canada's second largest telecommunications company, and specifically the part of Telus that tries to sell "solutions" to business.
Jeff Lowe, vice-president of energy sector marketing for the Burnaby-based company, acknowledges that it's not easy.
"Business value is really in the eyes of the beholder," he says. "It could be in the hard ROI, cost savings or increased revenues, but when you get into our public sector and health care clients, they describe business value very differently. They talk about increased client care, increased knowledge of our citizens or happier Canadians. So how the heck do you get your arms around that?" How indeed? IDC Canada, with the sponsorship of Telus, has created an online tool that may shed some light on this subject. It's called BVIC - business value of integrated communications.
You answer a series of about 50 questions concerning a planned or completed technology project, and you're told how you stack up against your peers, on a scale of 1 to 100. "It's a best-practices model," says Lowe, "and it proved out in the research. Those who follow the 30 best practices have a higher correlation of business value."
Ron Murch of the Haskayne School of Business at the University of Calgary taught Jeff Lowe in business school, so it made sense to see how his student was faring in the real world.
Murch also put a realistic project through the BVIC mill, helping the computer science department at the U of C to rethink a basic computer course designed for business students who don't intend to major in the subject.
Armed with a $30,000 grant, the team spent the better part of a year working on the project and plugged it into the BVIC model.
The results were fascinating. "There were four or five questions that really got me thinking along a dimension that I hadn't really spent very much time thinking about," says Murch. "One was in the area of partners. We hadn't really thought about the fact that the students were a partner in this project. The checklist got me thinking that if we're designing the course for 2,500 students on campus, we should go and talk to the Students Union and others."
Murch found the exercise very beneficial, but a bit baffling. "I had a little trouble trying to figure out why Telus would be interested in doing something like this," he says, "because it's kind of generic. It's not particularly oriented towards the telecommunications industry or their products. So I was very interested to talk to Jeff about why they were being so altruistic in sponsoring this project."
Well the answer to that is pretty simple, according to Lowe - Telus realizes it has a bit of an image problem with business customers. "The telecommunications industry fundamentally has changed," he says, "and we've done some studies that show that there's pretty low awareness of what Telus specifically does. People, by and large, still think of us as the phone company."
What does the well-known Telus slogan "the future is friendly" mean for business? Jeff Lowe waxes poetic on that subject. "It means masking the incredibly complex technology and the acronyms, and trying to keep up with the pace of it all, and figuring out what it can do for my business or my organization."
When reminded that the net costs of most technologies, from laptop computers to consumer electronics, keep on dropping, Lowe suggests we won't be seeing Wal-Mart style price rollbacks from his company. "The more we get engaged with them (business customers) about an actual solution versus commodity hype, the more those (price sensitive) conversations go away ... the discussion moves away from pure cost."
He's frank about the fact that the BVIC tool is a way to generate business leads for Telus, and says they're training specialized representatives to follow up on them. Industry observers have suggested that fragmentation has been a problem at Telus, and some have even compared it with the "old IBM," where several different salespeople would call on a customer touting competing solutions.
At last count, Telus was up to 433 companies in its BVIC database, and about 25 per cent had pursued it to the second level, which involves sitting down with a Telus rep. Like those online IQ tests, you can get your score, which Lowe calls "instant gratification" online, but you have to contact Telus if you want to see your full profile.
Is BVIC working as a door-opener for Telus? "We're getting new contacts in IT and the business side," says Lowe, "and they might not buy a solution from us today or this year, and from my perspective, that's fine. It's about slowly changing people's perceptions about what Telus is."
And, on that subject, they'll be no jumping monkeys or dancing elephants on the business side of Telus.
But, if you look closely, there are some reptiles and amphibians in Telus' business literature. It's a subtle acknowledgement that, when it bought Clearnet Communications in 2001, Telus not only got the Mike network, it acquired an identity that descends from the Clearnet frog.
The challenge now is to turn it into a business value princess.
(Tom Keenan is a professor at the University of Calgary and an expert on technology and its social implications. He can be reached at keenan@businessedge.ca)
