How do you measure ... ? 'You Can't'

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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