The UK's Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) has announced that its Impact Calculator is designed to provide a robust, transparent and consistent means of predicting and measuring the impact of a new process or system on an organisation.
Produced in Microsoft Excel, the JISC infoNet Impact Calculator can be used to define and measure the benefit achieved through any process improvement. The tool comprises four main sections which provide the user with the opportunity to document the business process they are seeking to improve; to define the nature of the benefits they are trying to achieve and how they intend to measure them; to capture detailed performance data for each of the benefits defined both prior to and at intervals after the completion of the change initiative; and to record the costs associated with realising that change. Once the relevant data has been entered into the Calculator it will then chart the level of improvement realised and determine if and when a 'return on investment' (ROI) will be - or was - realised.
Six JISC-funded pilot projects have tested the Impact Calculator within a records management context - the Universities of Nottingham, Cardiff, Aberdeen, Huddersfield, Oxford and King's College London - ranging from improvements to email management and enhancements to the retrospective appraisal of HR records. The pilot at the University of Nottingham, for instance, showed that the introduction of a new system to manage student case records would recoup the initial investment costs during its third year of implementation and would thereafter save the university a little over £4,500 per annum.
King's College London found that changes to the storage of electronic records within the estates department would save over £10,000 per annum and the University of Aberdeen calculated that the provision of email training could result in a 38 percent reduction in the volume of emails retained by staff.
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