It's about time

In an article in Forbes, George Gilder said: “In an age of affluence, life spans become the residual scarcity against which the values of policies, companies, and commodities are measured. The question becomes, Are you a life-span extender or a life-spam vendor? ... the Internet now casts a shadow over the entire established information economy. Just as the lightspeed limit opens large opportunities for companies supplying new network computers and topologies, so the life-span limit opens large opportunities for companies that focus on saving the customer's time.”

We like the acronym: ROTI – Return On Time Invested – to describe this.

The people you want to connect with have plenty to do. They are not looking for something to do in addition to what they are doing. They are looking for an alternative to what they are doing that will make them more effective, informed, entertained, connected, etc. One measure of the value of what you provide is how well you do that quicker.

Enterprise 2.0 provides opportunities to reduce the time it takes customers and employees to find what they want, do what they need to, and move to the next item on their to-do list. We now rely on our email system to sort our mail, toss out the junk, and help us deal with what we have time for now. But the first time you do this you have to learn how to set up the filters and then you have to keep them current. That takes time. If you get a lot of mail, that’s time well spent. If not, the ROTI is too high.

In building this blog we have been eating from the EW2 candy bowl and the learning curve is making us a bit woozy. Each new tool takes some linear time to learn and tailor. The time to learn and tailor limits the pace of adoption, but those who invest their time wisely are empowered to do more. Life is full of trade-offs.

EW2 sites and other tools that are well built in terms of ease of use and value delivered will optimize ROTI and justify the time it takes the user to use it. Anything less will be resisted by employees or cast aside by customers.