I did my own take on the ROI question here: The ‘hit by a bus’ social media ROI method which takes on very different issues of whether ROI is even a coherent concept.

The big confusion is that in information-work companies, there is no easy way to compute the ROI of any unit smaller than the entire company. Everything is a ‘cost’ and returns happen only at the level of a customer engaging the whole value proposition. Staff/line distinctions become meaningless, and it is hard to say how much of a lost/won sale to attribute to presence/absence of (say) a wiki to accelerate the sales cycle, and how much to feature comparisons with competing products. It all matters.

There was some movement starting decades ago to rationalize accounting for information-work based companies. I am no accountant, but the big distinction is between cost-accounting and activity-based accounting.

But, not to sound like a broken record, the ROI argument is a red herring set up by those who want to confuse an issue of strategy by bringing in irrelevant notions of accounting. The only accounting term that matters are strategic ones: the “opportunity cost” of not enjoying a period of social-media fueled differentiation before it becomes a “cost of doing business.”

Operational sub-company-sized ROI arguments can and have been made (for example ROI in customer acquisition/retention terms for a specifically marketing-oriented investment), but a war is not the sum of a bunch of battles, some measurable and some not. Social media as point-fix tactics is ROI-measurable and not very interesting. Social media as representing the DNA of a business strategy is NOT ROI-measurable and IS interesting.

In other words, ROI illuminates the sideshows and leaves the big tent in darkness.

My only extra 2cents is that understanding SOA is less of an issue than having an ‘architect’ to engage in and champion/facilitate it’s fruits, rather than the typical ‘drafters’ that are employed by IT.

In reading “if you are not doing so with a meaning for the words ‘return’, or ‘investment’”, made me think, for the typical endeavor the title should be JTI: Justify This Investment. There is clearly no ‘continuity’ in the process (in most cases) as implied by the term ROI. If there were, we’d have continuous ROI dashboards to watch the investments and their return continue to compete with one another. Ever seen one?