Impact Calculator

The Aberdeen team demonstrated a reduction in the size of staff email accounts of 38% each year from those who received training in email management when compared against the size of the email accounts of those staff who received no such training would appear to represent a clear cut example of achieving a successful return on investment via an improvement to records management practice, and a ringing endorsement of the Impact Calculator in measuring it - even if the resulting saving of £6,648.00 by Year 5 is comparatively modest.

The Aberdeen project illustrated some of the complexity which can arise even when dealing with seemingly straightforward metric measurement, such as the volume of email stored, as the following quote from their project report demonstrates:

"Calculating the benefits was a good deal more difficult. A strict comparison between the 37MB decrease of those trained and the 85MB increase of those not trained suggests that a saving of 124MB of storage could be made for each staff member; projected over a year this would be 744MB per person. With 3002 FTE staff as a baseline, this would suggest that, in principle, a fully trained workforce could reduce their requirement for email storage by 2,181GB. At around £5.50 per gigabyte, this would translate into £11,996 per year; even without the sophisticated calculations available through the Impact Calculator it can be seen that this would be more than the cost of training all staff in better email management.

 "However, in practice, savings would not be made in quite this way. The University's current arrangement for email management is the 500MB limit, and the real outcome would simply be that staff would reach that limit more often. The trained staff would not continue to reduce their stored email and the remainder would not increase theirs indefinitely. For the purpose of showing a saving in the Impact Calculator, it was necessary to make the assumption that email-trained staff would hold their storage to around the level of 335MB and that the others would average 500MB. It was assumed that the cost of storage would remain the same over 5 years"

Download pilot results: University of Aberdeen Spreadsheet