Check this book out. Doug Hubbard writes about measuring anything. How often do we say that something cannot be measured. It's a myth. We measure consumer confidence. bulls, bears and customer satisfaction. Everything is measurable as long as you understand the context.
I am eager to focus on metrics in two ways. How do we measure the industry impact of using ACORD Standards. And how do developers measure the ROI of industry standards baked into their products.
Now you might think that its like measuring the value of the telephone or social media or language for that matter. Silly huh. Do we need to actually cost justify the use of standard communications protocols? I think not. Yet because our legacy infrastructure is repleat with a patchwork of band aid solutions to share data, there is a tendency to under-appreciate the real value of industry standards. And the cost associated with proprietary fixes tend to be hidden throughout the process and viewed as a cost of doing business,
To be fair, we do have a ways to go before ACORD Standards become a de facto ingredient in all insurance software development. I'll talk more about this later, but it involves making standards less complex for developers to bake into their projects. So in the mean time, demonstrating value in terms that the average executive can appreciate makes sense.
I think metrics will help some to overcome barriers to implementation. More importantly, I think it will move the conversation away from measuring the investment in standards to meaarung the cost of doing business without them. Executives may not understand ACORD standards, but they do understand what throwing money out the window looks like. So giving them a lens to identify the total cost associated with not using standards will be a good thing. How To Measure Anything
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