With all of today’s many innovations, when is it justifiable for your business to invest in new technology? This is just the question posed at a seminar during last month’s Public Library Association Conference in Portland, Oregon. Lori Bowen Ayre from the Galecia Group, Fresno County Public Library’s Kathleen Smith and Salt Lake County Library’s Associate Director, Gretchen Freeman applied a traditional cost-benefit analysis, with a Jane Austen inspired twist, to determine when a new technology project is justified for implementation. Their presentation, Cents and Sensibility: Will your Technology Pay Off, was so thought provoking conference attendees were inspired to respond with blogs and tweets following (and during) the seminar.
What is a cost-benefit analysis?
As the seminar discussed, a cost-benefit analysis is performed to determine return on investment. The analysis compares associated costs and benefits of four parts: financial, operational, business image and customer perspective. The PLA Conference obviously focused on implementing new technologies within public libraries; however the information presented is applicable to other industries and organizations as well. For example, many industries use traffic counting systems, from retailers to libraries and casinos to churches, in order to collect data on the number of people entering a facility. The cost-benefit analysis can be performed to determine if the financial, operational, image and customer benefits outweigh the associated costs of implementing such a system.
Four Parts of Analysis
Financial Impact- Taking a closer look, financially, a people counting system incurs the cost of hardware, software and installation. Using a counter in conjunction with software saves staff time and money by automatically generating data reports as opposed to manually counting and/or retrieving data.
Operational Impact- Operationally, counting systems are easy to install and set-up and require little operational change to a business.
Image Impact – Analyzing the image portion of cost-benefit concludes that image is not much of a factor, considering the discrete, small size of counters and the different mounting options.
Customer Impact – Finally, considering customer perspectives, a system would not directly affect customers, but they would adversely benefit from the implementation. Count data permits for calculations such as conversion ratio and staff-to-patron ratios as well as which areas of a facility are visited most frequent. All calculations can then be used to more efficiently run a facility and better serve visitors.
As concluded from the example analysis, people counting systems are justifiable when the benefits are greater than the costs, leaving a logical explanation and reasoning for following through with implementation.
As first time exhibitors at PLA, we were excited to have access to relevant information and seminars like this one as well as weigh-in on attendee’s perspectives through the PLA Twitter feed and blog. We look forward to gaining even further knowledge at the American Library Association Annual Conference this summer.
For more information on people counting systems for libraries and why a business should use people counters please visit our website.
Cents and Sensibility seminar PowerPoint slides: http://galecia.com/included/docs/2010/CentsSensibility_PLA2010.pptx
