Developing Evidence

Continuing the discussion around determining ROI for my Credit Union on the Microsoft Enterprise Agreement...

Now that we have our quick list of all the issues, next we need to develop evidence that will help to verify the existence of those issues. In other words, regarding each one of our issues, how do we know this issue to be true? If we're dealing with a problem, what's letting us know this is a problem? What data do we have to verify the existence of this problem? If we're dealing with a result, what are the metrics of success? How will we measure that we did our job? How will we know if we are successful?

During this phase, we'll be looking for one of four possible categories of evidence:

• No Evidence - This is pretty self-explanatory. We have no way to prove that an issue is a problem.
• Soft Evidence - Anecdotal evidence. Sometimes hearsay. Might be reported by an insignificant sampling of individuals.
• Presumed Evidence - Data from some third-party source. This data may or may not apply to our specific organization, but we're presuming it might.
• Hard Evidence - Real data within our organization that verifies the existence of the problem or which would verify the existence of the result.

Obviously, of the four categories of evidence, we'd like to get hard evidence. It often times won't exist, however. If hard evidence does not already exist, we can perform some additional work to develop the evidence. Evidence will be extremely important in either approving or disproving the need for the solution. And, lack of evidence is usually a vulnerability to adoption of any solution.

In my next post, I'll start to develop evidence from the list of issues I began in my last post...and see how it goes!