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I once worked with a web and teleconferencing technician. His boss wanted to know the answer to the following question: “Is the service worthwhile to maintain?” The technician’s service cost the amount of a full-salaried employee, plus expensive equipment, a dedicated room, and monthly fees. The boss wanted to know if the costs were worth the benefits.

By now you’re probably demanding that I define “the service,” “worthwhile,” and “maintain.” You should be! The service could be all forms of con-ferencing, or it could be only web conferencing that requires the technician’s time and has a recurring fee. If the teleconference method is a sunk cost and doesn’t require intervention by the technician, this may not be a factor.

When we ask if something is “worthwhile”—what exactly do we mean? Is it simply a question of monetary return on investment? Does goodwill count? Do employee productivity, effectiveness, and efficiency matter? And finally, what do we mean by maintain? To have it at all? To pay the salary of the technician? To have our own facility vs. using a contracted or hosted solution? Does “maintain” include hardware maintenance? Does it include upgrades to software? How about repairs and replacements?

Once we have clear definitions for the terms that make up the root question, we will have a much better picture! Remember the importance of a common language. It is equally important that everyone fully understands the language used to create the root question.

Figure 2-2 shows the picture the technician and I drew of his service metric.

Figure 2-2. Web/teleconferencing value

The picture we drew depicts the value gained (costs avoided) by using the web-conferencing system. We anticipated showing information on money savings (travel and hotel costs), time savings (the time to travel), environmental savings (fuel consumption and CO2 emissions), and the happiness of the clients who were able to more easily meet “face-to-face” with others. These factors would be compared to the actual costs incurred.

This is not a perfect metric. There is no such thing in my experience. You can’t prove that the costs would have been incurred without the system. It’s like assuming that if we didn’t have telephones, we’d write or visit family more often. While we can’t categorically say this would happen, for the purposes of determining the avoided costs, or the value of the service, we have to make these assumptions.

Information

We asked a lot of clarifying questions—seeking definitions for all of the parts of the root question. The definitions led us to the following information decision (we only wanted to answer one aspect of the root question): How much do we save? How much money, jet fuel, CO2 emissions, and time do we potentially save by maintaining the conferencing center? This clarification made the next phase purposeful. Rather than chase all manner of data, we could focus our efforts only on the measures and data we needed.

Measures

We designed measures that would reveal the following:

The amount of time saved for each conference

The amount of money saved for each conference Travel funds saved (plane fare and taxis)

Hotel funds (when the distance dictates an overnight stay)

The amount of CO2 emissions saved for each conference

Data

To build the measures, we needed data like the following:

Locations participating in the web/teleconference

Number of participants at each location

Distance from each location to the “host” location. For purposes of the metric, we had to determine a “host” location that participants would travel to. If our location were the host, we wouldn’t gain the savings—but our colleagues could claim them If the meeting is held at location X (because of protocol, for example) the distance from each participating starting point.

If protocol doesn’t dictate a specific meeting location—then which location has the most participants

Plane fare amounts to and from the host location

The CO2 emissions from airplanes for these flights

If the