The relationship between investment and returns in the Web site conversion is best expressed in terms of shifts in productivity and opportunity. The principal costs of the project are reflected in the opportunities sacrificed and the added personnel costs incurred in order to develop new skills and capabilities. The primary cost component is opportunity costs: staff were diverted from routine work to learn new skills and to begin to use the new techniques. Some additional staff resources, in the form of graduate students, were used as well. The magnitude of that opportunity cost is represented in the comparison between the two charts in figures 4 and 5.

If the project had not been started (Figure 4) there would be available resources during the first three months of the time-frame to maintain routine Web development and to pursue some new opportunities. In the same time period (Figure 5), by contrast, the project began with a much expanded Web development/learning effort that consumed all slack resources and some operational resources. No other opportunities were taken up and ordinary Web operations were reduced. That was a period of substantial investment with little return.

By months 4–5 into the project (Figure 5), sufficient learning had taken place and allowed for exploiting new opportunities. As experience and the stock of usable components grew, the cost of added development dropped rapidly and resources were freed up to undertake even more new opportunities.

Figure 4. Cost Trends

Figure 5. Cost Trends

The cost of ordinary Web operations did grow somewhat during that period due to the normal development of new content. However, the total cost of including new content and making routine maintenance changes in the site is expected to drop, despite increasing volume, due to the increased efficiency of the dynamic architecture. As efficiency in the development and operations of Web site work increase, the opportunities for exploiting new opportunities grow. This can be contrasted with the projections in Figure 4 that suggest the increasing cost of ordinary operations under the old architecture will squeeze out development opportunities and in time will likely exceed the budget constraint.

This kind of opportunity-based analysis can show positive results when relatively little financial data is available, and when the value of new products or capabilities are difficult to determine. There are no savings apparent from this effort unless the analysis takes into account what it would cost to develop these new capabilities and exploit new opportunities under the old technology. However, the expansion of development opportunities over time, in contrast to the baseline scenario, does give a reasonable basis for estimating the returns for an investment such as this in its early stages. Since the projections are based on the early stages of the work, it is possible that the unanticipated problems of increased scale could change the results over a longer term.