On time, on budget, and still behind.

Most executive teams are measuring whether technology gets delivered, not whether it moves the business forward.

Organizations often measure technology by activity. How many tickets are closed? How many tools are deployed? How many projects are delivered on time?

Yet, none of these metrics answer whether technology is changing what your business is capable of doing. They measure activity, not capacity.

Take project delivery, for example. A project finishing on time tells you simply that the project finished on time. It doesn't tell you whether the business can now do something it couldn't do before, or whether anyone is using that new capability to move the company forward. I've watched ERP implementations finish on schedule and new platforms launch successfully, but then six months later, leadership is still having the same conversations about the same problems.

By every measure the organization was tracking, the project succeeded. Which means the organization's measures were wrong. They were measuring whether the project finished, not whether it delivered value.

Here's what I've come to believe: the metrics you use to evaluate technology investment reveal which stage you're actually operating at. And most leadership teams are measuring at a lower stage than they think they are. I think about it in four stages, where each stage has a characteristic way of measuring technology.

You can’t expect to move forward while still measuring backward. When teams are in stage 1 or 2, they often end up over-investing in systems and under-investing in data, people, and processes, because systems are the easiest thing to count.

A few years ago, I talked with a leader who was frustrated that his team wasn’t thinking strategically.

His compliance team was a large group of people whose job, as they described it, was to call stakeholders, request documents, and verify that the paperwork was in order. When I asked what value they created, they knew the answer: reduce legal and compliance risk. When I looked at how they spent their time, it consumed so much capacity that they rarely got to do the work only they could do.

The paperwork had become their job because the team was optimized around the activity, not the outcome. We built technology systems so that the routine document collection could be handled, freeing the team to use their human judgement to identify exceptions and truly manage risk. Both their activity and outcome metrics improved. But more importantly, the team stopped spending their best hours on work that didn't require them. They started operating at the level they were actually capable of, focused on the high-value judgment calls that only they could make.

That's what moves an organization from Structured to Strategic. A clearer answer to what the system is supposed to make possible.

If something here resonated, I'd love to think it through with you.

Talk soon,

Josh