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ROI - Relying On Ignorance

By Joe Banks

An interesting statistic came out the other day off the back of the quarterly research published by e-Skills UK. The survey revealed that only 11% of companies put any kind of benchmark in place to measure the return on investment (ROI) of IT spending. 

That’s a pretty shocking figure, but to be honest, it won’t come as much of a surprise to anybody involved in tech PR, particularly if you’ve ever tried to develop a customer story on behalf of a client.  Pitching the story to a journalist as a potential case study, one of the first things any hack worth his salt will ask is something along the lines of “so, how much money/time has this amazing piece of technology actually saved them?” or “how exactly has this ‘improved productivity’ and ‘impacted positively on the company culture’?”  These are perfectly fair questions, but often, the PR is at a loss as to how to answer them.

Of course, justifying tech spend to the media should be the least of an IT director’s worries – what about accountability to the FD/board, especially if the project has gone way over budget or has decidedly failed to deliver on promised benefits? Though on saying that, what about when those stories do get leaked to the papers – it’s usually a pretty uncomfortable experience for all involved.  The irony is that projects usually get out of control exactly because definable ROI benchmarks haven’t been put in place.

The age of IT directors assessing the success (or otherwise) of a new IT implementation through the application of ‘informed guesswork’ or ‘personal intuition’ surely needs to come to an end.  And while the humble PR agency may not have a great deal of influence in changing a nation’s business culture, we can at least keep on pushing our clients to encourage their customers to quantifiably measure the impact of new installations.  It’d certainly make those case studies a damn sight easier to sell in…

Blue Security, and why it's a bad move to go after the spammers

By Tom Kirkham

The demise of Blue Security is a stark warning to the IT industry that trying to spam spammers is like fighting fire with fire.  The Israeli anti-spam firm called it a day after a Russian spammer launched denial of service attacks against practically every organisation associated with the firm. 

Blue Security's tactic was to encourage its members to report every spam email they received.  The firm would then contact the spammers, often multiple times, to request  the removal of members' email addresses, in an attempt to give spammers a taste of their own medicine. 

But while the company was initially lauded for its approach, it was inevitable that retribution would be forthcoming.  What exactly did Blue Security expect to happen?  Blue Security was attacking organised criminals - a move that is hardly likely to elicit an apology and an assurance that it won't happen again.  On top of this, spammers can draw upon far greater resources than most companies, by virtue of the fact that they operate outside of the law! 

Let's face it, combating the spam problem doesn't require a company to go round pretending to be Dirty Harry - it requires continued education to persuade people from replying to unsolicited email. At the end of the day, how ever annoying it may be to receive a stream of emails offering improved manhood or investment opportunities in Uzbekistan, the Blue Security incident has surely demonstrated that the consequences of retaliation are far worse than the hassle of hitting the delete button.