$~:cat notes/measurement
Measuring automation responsibly
Activity is easy to count. Usefulness takes more care. These are the distinctions I use when thinking about automation, rather than a dashboard of private operations.
- Measured cost
- Billed spend is evidence of what a system costs within a stated scope. Say which costs are included and which are missing before comparing systems.
- Runtime and completed work
- Time spent running describes activity. A completed job still needs a clear definition of success and a check that its output is useful.
- Estimated effort
- Multiplying completed tasks by an assumed manual duration produces an estimate. It does not establish how much time someone actually saved.
- Estimated value
- Applying a market rate to estimated effort adds another assumption. Label it clearly and keep it separate from revenue, realized savings, or demonstrated impact.
- Missing information
- Unknown is different from zero. Make gaps visible instead of filling them with a confident number, and explain the limits of any comparison.
- What to publish
- Share the method and its limitations. Leave out product identities, launch dates, operational schedules, and other details that could connect anonymized examples to private systems.