Return on Technology

The instinct when measuring this kind of work is to count what came out of it — documents produced, hours saved, people reached. Output is easy to count and it is close to meaningless, because producing more has become trivial and therefore says nothing about whether anything improved.

So this app measures returns instead, across six dimensions, and it deliberately keeps them apart rather than combining them into an index. The reason is that they are not commensurable: hours removed from an administrator and previously excluded people who gained access are both real, both good, and adding them produces a number that means nothing. Each is recorded with its own unit for that reason.

Every one of these six is a figure you assert. The app did not watch them happen and does not pretend it did. That is why they are marked differently everywhere they appear and never totalled with the figures the app did observe — adoptions, test results, cleared gates, practice days.

This separation is not fussiness. A record that blends what was witnessed with what was claimed cannot be relied on as either, and the whole point of keeping a record is that somebody might later rely on it — including you.

Be conservative when you fill these in. The number that helps you is the one you would still defend if someone asked how you arrived at it.