Businesses of any size cannot function without technology. However, a critical oversight is that very few actually evaluate the money spent on technology against the value they get in return.

This is especially difficult for technology that deals with unstructured work—work that doesn't follow a defined business process. Unlike line-of-business applications that automate a process and make savings easy to calculate, technology for unstructured work only optimizes it, leaving it unstructured. This makes it hard to prove and quantify how much better the work has become.

1. Dramatic Improvement: It should dramatically improve an existing task or process.
2. New Capability: It should provide a new and useful capability that is directly relevant to your specific business outcomes.

Example 1: Advanced Search in Microsoft Word
Beyond a simple Ctrl+F, the "Find in" dialog allows you to search specifically in comments, headers, footers, or text boxes. For someone needing to search only in comments, this feature provides a targeted benefit that was previously unavailable.

Example 2: Intelligent Navigation in Excel
For very large spreadsheets, manually scrolling is inefficient. The "Go To Special" function allows for intelligent and faster navigation to specific types of cells, such as those with formulas, blanks, or constants, saving significant time and improving accuracy.

The key is to calculate the total time saved across an organization for a specific activity.

1. Time Saved Per Instance: Estimate how much time a feature saves each time it is used. For example, a feature might save 9 minutes compared to the old way.
2. Frequency of Use: Estimate how often that task is performed per person. For example, 4 times a week.
3. Annualize: Multiply by the number of weeks in a year the task is performed, e.g., 30 weeks.
4. Scale Across the Company: Multiply by the number of people who perform that task, e.g., 500 people.

Calculation: 9 minutes/use × 4 uses/week × 30 weeks/year × 500 people = a significant, tangible number of minutes (or hours) saved.

This process is then repeated for multiple activities, across different products and people.

Intangible benefits, such as the guarantee that a formula in an Excel table applies to all rows, cannot be given a direct monetary value. However, you can assign a time-equivalent benchmark to them.

For instance, you might determine that the improved accuracy in a given situation is equivalent to saving 7 minutes of rework or error-checking. This converts the intangible benefit into a quantifiable time saving.

The biggest problem is that no one is responsible for converting the technology investment into a business benefit. The IT department handles deployment, HR handles training, and finance approves the spending, but there is no ownership of the actual value creation. Someone must be made explicitly responsible for this outcome.

A dedicated team, such as a "Change Team" or "Value Creation Team," should be formed. It should include at least one person from each department, chosen by the departmental head. This person is officially allocated 2-3 hours per week to focus on value creation.

The team's process is a continuous cycle:

1. Explore: Look at all products and features to understand their potential.
2. Validate: Test a feature in a specific department for a particular activity.
3. Share: If successful, demonstrate the better way to users and get their approval.
4. Standardize: Convert the new method into a standard operating procedure (SOP). To ensure company-wide adoption, this SOP should be communicated by the departmental heads.
5. Repeat: Continue this cycle of explore, validate, share, and standardize.