To come up with the tipping point (development payback), what I do is calculate the total cost of content before development and what the expected cost of content will be after development. This will tell you the cost savings the development effort will bring. When the cost of development is divided by the annual savings you will find when you will hit payback.

Of course the other thing is to look at when calculating payback is the life of the developed solution. If you look at the cost savings from the development and find that it will take 5 years to achieve development savings, I would question the effort. Very few applications have 5 year lives these days.

Cost of content is also valid for other metrics as well. I used this with some search metrics I was able to develop (more in another post) for a customer self-service center where we found that poor search capabilities were causing a significant amount of duplicate messages. The number of messages duplicated was not significant for management. But when I took the number of messages re-written and multiplied this by the average cost of content, we came up with a number, really a dollar figure, that everyone could understand.

And, BTW, how you doing?