I am not criticizing him. I believe that someone of Horn's caliber to be quite capable of the exercise. My assertion is this: He could not document the savings because there aren't any significant savings yet to report. Even if he had experienced such savings, he had no agreed-upon metrics with which to document and communicate them. So I ask: Extranets have been around for a while, so why haven't there been metric studies about them?
Fast-forward to the recent PikeNet Forum in San Francisco where attendees discussed information-technology strategies of contractors, owners and developers such as Bovis Lend Lease, Bank of America and Cushman & Wakefield. Everyone listened respectively as keynote speaker John Hagel, author of Net Gain and Net Worth, gushed about the "systematic reduction of interaction costs" by the Internet. But none of the other speakers felt that the Internet had reduced their overall costs. Many felt burdened by increased technology expenditures. And they wanted to know: "Who will absorb the costs of making the industry more efficientbrokers, landlords or tenants?"