If it walks like a duck and sounds like a duck then it’s probably… a duck. But don’t count on a duck to deliver ROI. <Insert expletive and comment about “what the hell is he talking about?!?!>

Aflac is a big brand with a quirky following. Well, they have a quirky mascot in the form of a duck that is their figurehead and advertising spokesperson… errr, spokesduck. You’ve no doubt heard the chortle of the affable duck sounding a little like Donald Duck if he had smoked one too many Cuban cigars (Oops! Of course, I meant to say Dominican or Guatemalan cigars… the kind that don’t fill the coffers of Generalissimo Fidel).

“AFLAC!” goes the familiar bellow. Go ahead play with the duck. Download the sound bite for your own amusement. Make sure you turn it up so that your fellow employees know that you’re busily working on some mission critical project.

Getting to the point… I just read a half decent case study on the Aflac intranet portal. The case study is in fact a sales pitch by BEA Plumtree who implemented their portal product as the platform for the Aflac intranet. But as far as commonly available intranet case studies go, this is not bad. It even has a mock-up of the Aflac portal home page proudly showcasing that ubiquitous, sad, out-of-the-box Plumtree look-and-feel.

Aflac’s Best Practices for Driving Portal Adoption and ROI is the name of the case study and webinar presented by Line 56 and BEA. Sounds encouraging and right to the point – with ROI! Boy, it’s refreshing to find a case study that promotes ROI and ACTUALLY has ROI! Except this ROI case study has no ROI. Nope, no ROI.

It’s really not a bad case study. There is some good process background and a couple of screenshots. But no ROI.

What’s the point I’m trying to make? Ducks make great mascots. No, that’s not it.

ROI is good, very good… if you actually have ROI. ROI stands for return on investment and is a monetary metric based on a formula where the value of an investment is divided by the cost of the investment (value ÷ cost = ROI). It is measured and demonstrated as a percentage of the initial investment (e.g. 95%).

A case study demonstrates a best practice and proves a measure of success. It is not a sales pitch. Beware the ROI case study with no ROI. If it walks like a duck and sounds like a duck… it might actually be a sales rep for a portal vendor.

To measure and increase the value of your intranet, please dowload the free white paper, Finding ROI.

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Some good intranet case studies with ROI:

Leading intranet case study: IBM’s W3

Intranet Insider World Tour: Sodexho USA

Part II - QAS intranet case study – anatomy of a winner

QAS intranet case study – anatomy of a winner

More reading on intranet ROI (with real ROI!!):

Intranet ROI

More than ROI

Intranet ROI (Back Issue)

Measure your efforts

© 2006 Toby Ward - Prescient Digital Media

The world’s largest and most troubled intranet is moving forward with a $3.1 billion program extension. The U.S. Navy-Marine Corps. Intranet (NMCI) has been managed and steered by EDS since its inception in 2000. Under a new contract extension EDS will continue to build out the network through 2010.

The consolidated voice, video and data network links hundreds of thousands of military and at its peak will connect more than 500,000 sailors and Marines at about 1,000 locations across the planet.

The project has been greatly troubled but with both EDS and the Pentagon at odds over costs. According to GCN.com (Navy, EDS avert NMCI divorce at least for now), both parties “recently resolved long-standing claims over the Navy-Marine Corps Intranet program, with the Navy agreeing to fork over $100 million to settle the contract dispute.”

EDS purportedly has lost a lot of money on the multi-billion dollar project and was said to have been seeking more than $780 million from the Navy in additional costs. Mainly “what it lost on the Pentagon IT reconstitution after Sept. 11, 2001, and the expenses associated with reducing legacy applications and maintaining dual desktops,” according to Lt. John Gay, a Navy spokesman quoted on GCN.com.

One U.S. congressman is openly protesting the contract extension. Representative Mark Kirk (R-Ill.), a Navy Reserve officer, was quoted on InsideDefense NewsStand as saying:  

“(NMCI) is one of the most customer-unfriendly operations that I think I’ve ever seen.”

He said he had heard “horror stories” about the system. NMCI is “fundamentally hostile” to letting people communicate, he argued, adding the Navy is wasting money trying to fix and implement the system.

“It’s designed to provide such a security in inter-Navy e-mail that no one is communicating,” Kirk said. He said there is a “parallel Navy” running on civilian e-mail accounts.

(Thanks to The Fourth Rail and Bill Roggio).

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Meanwhile the Navy is adding now audio alternatives for feature articles on its Lifelines intranet (Navy adds audio to Lifelines intranet). As reported on CGN.com, the Navy is using Newfoundland based Goldwave to deliver these audio stories:  

Since March, two former Navy officers with backgrounds in broadcast journalism who now work on the Lifelines Services Network site at http://www.lifelines.navy.mil have lent their voices to narrate articles that can be downloaded to MP3 players and iPods.

“We started noticing at the Washington Navy Yard and other bases all of the young sailors going around with iPods and MP3 players, and we said why don’t we start recording these things,” said retired Navy Capt. William Hendrix, director of the Lifelines portal.
To accomplish the podcast-like feature, the site uses digital audio software designed by GoldWave Inc. of Canada.

The Navy established the LifeLines portal in January 1999 as an intranet to improve the quality of life for sailors. Among its offerings, the portal provides self-help information, education services and crisis assistance.

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