Although not scientific, here's a simple return on investment [ROI] analysis for one use case of RSS. Imagine you're a marketing director for a large firm. Each morning you must log into the corporate portal and review information concerning your job. By virtue of very specific processes developed by your manager and the IT administrator of the portal, there are seven pages that will contain the information that you should be focusing on at least once a day - preferably three times a day. Assume this task takes approximately 7 minutes total (or about 1 minute per page). Also assume the navigation steps require about 1.5 minutes of the total time spent; 1125 minutes per year. Assume also that it takes about 12 seconds to determine if a given page has changed. 7 pages, three times a day is another 4.2 minutes a day or 1050 minutes a year. Combined this represents about 2175 minutes per year spent navigating between pages wondering which are new – all necessary to get the information to do a job. This fictional director of marketing spends a little over 36 hours a year navigating to these seven pages just to SEE if anything has changed. If we assume that [on average] three of the seven pages change only a few times a week, we can see a pattern of time usage in the following chart for User A whom endures a fixed cost of visiting all seven pages three times a day. Imagine an RSS-based solution where the newsreader is receiving only a list of the changes on certain pages and does so every hour. Not only have you eliminated the time you spend looking at a page to see if it has changed, you eliminate the navigation time and the need to navigate to the pages when they haven’t changed. This causes rapid acceleration of awareness of the subject matter for User B (an RSS adopter) while also eliminating more than 90% of time spent navigating and pondering. For a single employee this seems insignificant. Furthermore, there are costs associated with acquiring the reader technology, engineering the feeds, and perhaps providing RSS training. However, in a 10,000 person company, it starts to add up (10,000 x 36 hours = 360,000 person hours of savings per year). At a very modest $20/hour office worker salary, you can buy a lot of technology for $7.2 million dollars. And this example includes one very small slice of the typical office worker's information diet. Factor in the portal visits to HR and the many other information sources that employees are expected to stay abreast of, and you have a recipe for widespread productivity enhancement. Where's the money? It's hiding in all the pennies spent finding information instead of information finding you. ;-) | 
