RE: what to measure -- Value or Expense, was Re: Responsibility

Andrey,

>  CP> It's hard - as I assume you know - to assign cash flow to certain
>  CP> things. This is particularly true in IT, where it's all internal.
> 
> Sure, I know that.  Nevertheless, I have strong feelings (no facts now)
> that it's closely tied to particular organization style widespread in
> world.  My wild guess is, after organizational adoption of Agile and Lean
> principles, it would be much easier to estimate such ephemerial things. 
> 
> No facts still..  Gonna to spend couple years in business development to
> produce, analyze and publish such things...  

Cool.
 
>  CP> For example, I worked on a system many years ago that improved
>  CP> the ability of staff to retrieve customer information. There was
>  CP> no projection of cost savings, because we were investing money to
>  CP> provide new - or better - service to customers than before.
> 
> Aha..  New or improved service...  Could manager you mentioned later,
> estimate how much cash flow and when it would generate?  Even 
> informally.. 

Sure... none. This is a government agency with a monopoly on the
particular service it provides - a water utility. The new system
was introduced because it was becoming difficult to manually find
the information that customers wanted.

I agree that one can often quantify things that don't seem quantifiable
at the outset. But I don't think it's always possible - at least if
you want the value to be something other than arbitrary.
 
> [...]
> 
>  CP> Btw, I expect most top executives would understand and smile at
>  CP> your characterization of the measure as Expense rather than
>  CP> Value... even those who are doing it.
>  >> 
>  >> Why?
> 
>  CP> I'm not sure I understand what the Why applies to, but I'll try
>  CP> to answer.
> 
>  CP> What I was suggesting is that you should not believe that people
>  CP> who measure expense instead of final value are simply stupid. They
>  CP> may wish for a better measure of value, but they only have what
>  CP> they have.
> 
>  CP> Smiling is all they believe they can do at that moment. It's black
>  CP> humor of course...
> 
> Ah, _that_ way :)  Got it.

Somehow I thought you would. ;-)

Charlie Poole
[email protected]
www.pooleconsulting.com
www.charliepoole.org







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