If you spend time thinking about investments in online classifieds and content, this piece by Harvard Business School professor Andrew McAffee is worth reading.
McAffee coined the term Enterprise 2.0 a few months ago. In this piece he contrasts evaluation of traditional corporate investments (e.g., widget assembly lines) to less-tangible technology investments (e.g., wikis). I think there are parallels with evalution of investments in classifieds and harder-to-measure online content.
This particular vignette will resonate in online newsrooms:
A little while back I was presenting the concepts and structure of my MBA course to a diverse group of my HBS colleagues. Pretty early on one of the professors in the Finance area asked me the question I was most dreading and least prepared for: "Andy, what do you teach students about conducting a financial analysis of proposed IT investment? How do you build a business case for IT?"
I was about to launch into a long-winded and poorly argued answer, but Bob Kaplan spoke up first. "You can’t," he said.
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Posted by: Uggs Clearance | September 26, 2011 at 09:48 PM