Tag Archives: #digital

Defining RoDA: Return on #Digital Assets

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How do we measure the Return on Investment for digital assets? It’s a question that is starting to challenge digital marketers and IT managers alike, but there don’t appear to be too many guidelines. Whether your social media campaign is being expensed as direct marketing costs, or your hardware upgrade is being capitalised, how do you work out the #RoDA?

In most businesses, measuring the expected RoI of plant or equipment is usually quite easy: it’s normally a financial calculation that takes the initial acquisition price, amortized over the useful life of the asset, and then forecasts the “yield” in definable terms such as manufacturing output or capacity utilisation.

However, when we look at digital assets, many of those traditional calculations won’t apply, either because the usage value is harder to define, or the benchmarks have not been established. Also, while hardware costs may be easy to capture, how are digital assets such as websites, social media accounts, software (proprietary and 3rd party) and domain names being reported in the P&L, cash-flow analysis and balance sheet?

Sure, most hardware (servers, PCs and physical networks) can be treated as capex (e.g., if the purchase price is more than $1,000 and the useful life is 2-5 years). But how do you make sure you are getting value for money – is it based on some sort of productivity analysis, or is it simply treated as fixed overhead – regardless of your turnover or operating costs?

As we move to cloud hosting and #BYOD, many of these assets utilised in the course of doing business won’t actually appear on the company balance sheet. Yet they will have some sort of impact on the operating costs. Most software is sold under a licensing model, where the customer does not actually own the asset. (But, if the international accounting standards change the treatment of operating leases longer than 12 months, that 2-year cloud hosting fee might just became a balance sheet item.)

I was once involved in the acquisition of a publishing business that was converting legacy print products to digital content. Not only did they capitalise (and amortize) the servers and the conversion software, they also capitalised the data entry costs (using freelance editors) to avoid the expense hitting the P&L. Nowadays, that’s a bit like putting the HTML coding team on the balance sheet and not the payroll…

In some cases, the costs associated with maintaining an e-commerce website or registering a URL, will remain as overhead or operating expenses. But over time, businesses will want to have a better understanding of their RoI for different online sales and digital marketing channels, especially if they have been investing considerably in their design, build and maintenance. Measuring online visitor data, customer conversion rates and average yield per sale, etc. are becoming established metrics for many B2C sites. Having a good grasp of your #RoDA may just give you a competitive edge, or at least provide a benchmark on effective marketing costs.

 

Digital transactions hold the key for Australia Post

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Last week’s news that Australia Post is shedding jobs made unwelcome reading for the 900 unfortunate employees who are affected, and the recent proposal to restructure (combined with the implicit risk to rural postal services) has generated some highly charged media commentary and prompted very passionate customer responses.

My personal view is that Australia Post will have to maintain a commitment to letter delivery as part of its protected monopoly obligations. But a “user pays” model that results in higher charges for a “premium” postal service may fail to offset losses from standard snail mail – because businesses will make greater use of existing document exchange and courier services, and retail customers will prefer to receive their utility bills and bank statements by e-mail or other digital solutions such as mobile apps.

Australia Post faces a dual challenge, quite apart from the decline in its letter business (which is rightly seen as a community service, albeit one that should be able to at least cover its costs). First, although it has diversified with a range of products and services, there is very little cohesion across its individual lines of business, and nearly all of them face strong competition, and/or rely on external service providers. Also, according to one software developer I spoke to several months ago, the sheer number of available services meant that some customer service staff did not have sufficient product knowledge and needed an in-house app to train them on how to up- and cross-sell these products.

Second, although it is trying to get into digital solutions, it seems late to the party (e.g., the MyPost Digital Mailbox, which has taken about 12 months from initial announcement to market launch). A few years ago, when I was working on a standard business identifier solution for the financial services industry, Australia Post was well placed to leverage its in-house knowledge of business customers (location, size, industry, spending patterns, logistics, etc.) and combine it with a unique entity ID to enhance and upgrade its business CRM database. However, it was unable to incorporate third-party data sources that would have resulted in even greater analytics on business customer behaviour, because the legacy data systems were unable to cooperate (and the teams that ran them unwilling to collaborate…).

Australia Post’s anticipated expansion into financial services hasn’t materialised (the current CEO is a former banker). If Australia Post became an Authorised Depository Institute, it could offer on-line banking services in its own right, giving it an alternative funding source (in addition to, or instead of, issuing corporate bonds that are implicitly guaranteed by the government). Or, in conjunction with relevant partners Australia Post could expand its Load&Go pre-paid VISA card to become a universal stored value card (such as Hong Kong’s Octopus system).

Instead, Australia Post is relying on the current boom in online shopping to drive revenue growth from its parcels and logistics operations. To me, this is a short-sighted strategy.

If digital is the key to future growth (especially for a data-rich business that operates in logistics, communications and payment transaction services), Australia Post should be looking to  provide and expand business and consumer solutions in the following areas:

  • Digital document verification, validation and transmission (to help offset the decline in snail mail)
  • Location-based payment solutions (to leverage its geographic and transactional knowledge of business customers, especially retailers)
  • Update the current post code system to provide more granular customer data to businesses and to streamline delivery and location services (e.g., like the UK’s system of house number and postcode – imagine how that would make life easier for taxi drivers!)
  • Develop off-the-shelf productivity tools for SMEs – such as on-line data forms, CRM, CMS, e-commerce (become the IKEA of small business data apps – rather like flat-pack, self-assembly furniture, many businesses might welcome such a service)

Finally, if Australia Post thinks that parcel services will carry them through, consider this: each time I want to send a parcel overseas, the counter staff have to undertake the following steps:

  • weigh the item
  • calculate the postage (using a cumbersome sequence of drop down menus on their terminal screen)
  • capture some ID information (such as my driver’s license)
  • attach the customs declaration form (which I have manually completed) to the parcel
  • print the postage label and attach it to the parcel
  • attach an “ID sighted” label to the parcel
  • attach an “Air Mail” sticker to the parcel

More steps are involved if I want use any sort of tracking, insurance or express delivery service. What if I could complete an address and customs form label, and print it before I leave home (or at a terminal at the post office)? And what if this label had scannable items, such as the destination address, for easier processing at the counter?

 

 

 

Tools vs Solutions: When does our core offering need to change?

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As regular readers of this blog will be aware, recent posts have focussed on digital – content, products, pricing etc.

I’ve also been immersing myself in the digital design process (next step: learn code?) and earlier this month I attended a workshop by a leading digital design studio. While most of the session was devoted to their own particular design methodology (basically, UCD with some fancy footwork) it also revealed that in developing tools to help customers undertake their own design projects, they have become a subscription software business. No doubt, they will continue as a design consultancy, but clearly the core offering is changing.

This shift echoes an analysis of McKinsey Solutions by the Harvard Business Review in late 2013. Basically, it suggested that rather than providing an all-in-one solution (based on black box consulting methodologies and processes), consulting firms are having to unbundle their offering, allowing them to remain relevant and move to more defendable positions in the value chain. In the case of McKinsey Solutions, embedding analytical tools at client sites is a cost-effective way of delivering services, while gaining insights on their customer needs, which in turn allows them to develop enhanced tools.

So it raises the question: Do consultants need to re-think their offering – rather than being solutions providers, should they focus on being enablers? This may seem overly disruptive (and potentially disenfranchising) for the consulting industry; but in the long run it should mean clients become more reliant on value-added solutions that deploy tools that they know, understand and trust (and can use for themselves). It should also mean that clients will want to retain access to these tools as they evolve, because they will be more invested in their development and use.

 

Smart Designs: 5 Trends for Digital Products

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There are 5 key themes emerging in new digital products* that are grounded in the analogue world. It seems designers and developers are having to find ways to embrace analogue once more, and integrate it into digital solutions. While not everything old is new again, there are some distinct echoes of the past in many of these new developments.

Eno Hyde - Someday World

#1. Revivalism

Sony is reviving magnetic tape as a data storage medium – prompting some pundits to suggest that cassettes might be making a comeback. (Not if the participants in this video have their way…..) Interesting to note that tape storage is far more energy-efficient than traditional hard drive storage. And last week, Telstra announced the development of a major public Wi-Fi network which sounds like the stuff of the future, but looks back more than 25 years, with the launch of Telepoint services.

#2. Hybridisation

The combination of analogue and digital technologies** is not new (remember the Advanced Photo System and the Digital Compact Cassette from the 1990s?). But modern polymath Brian Eno and his latest musical collaborator Karl Hyde have just put out an iOS app that is designed to interact with the vinyl edition of their new album, “Someday World”. It’s not quite augmented reality, but the app uses that concept to project animated graphics to accompany the music when the user points the iPhone’s camera at the record label.*** This could just be the first example of making the vinyl record a digital artefact!

#3. Simulation

As someone who dabbles in iOS music apps (as well as beta-testing a few in my spare time), I have become used to replicating the analogue experience of old-school analogue synthesizers and drum machines on my iPhone and iPad. This has now been taken a step further with the launch of the iVCS3, an iPad version of one of the first portable analogue synthesizers from the late 1960s (an instrument made famous by The Who and Brian Eno, among others). A notoriously difficult piece of hardware to operate, it is almost the antithesis of digital predictability, yet makes perfect sense in the digital context when simulated via the touch screen interface of the iPad.

#4. Sensorial

Despite some concerns about smart phone biometric security tools, the use of biometrics in banking is a near certainty. Sensory-based smart phone applications and add-on devices in the areas of health (diagnostics), the environment (air quality monitoring) and even cooking (taste tests) will soon be commonplace.

#5. Interconnectivity

The Internet of Things is starting to get interesting (beyond the fridge that can do your grocery shopping), especially when combined with robotics (although this April fool spoof from Sphero was probably a bit too real for comfort….). A couple of physical devices that could find extended use when hooked up to an internet connection are the Auug (featured in the new Apple ads) and the SwatchMate Cube (a winner in the 2013 Melbourne Design Awards). For example, the Auug could be used in remote control or simulation applications, while SwatchMate could be modified to analyse surface materials beyond their colour properties.

NOTES

* I’ve been re-reading “Grounded Innovation: Strategies for Creating Digital Products” by Lars Erik Holmquist which has helped shaped some of my thinking on this topic.

** I thought I may have invented a new word as a possible title for this blog – Digilogue – until I came across this book. (But I took heart from the fact that the author, futurist Anders Sorman-Nilsson, like me also holds an LL.B.)

*** If you install the app and point your iPhone camera at the picture below, it should also have the same result as scanning the record label itself:

WARPLP249-Label