The Importance Of The Qualimetrics Measurement Methodology In Assessing The Impact Of Socio-Economic Intervention

This chapter is aimed at showing the need for a methodology to measure the impacts of socio-economic interventions. Indeed, CEOs and consultants often assert that costs have been cut or that revenue and profitability have increased thanks to their action, proving that intervention objectives have been met. This type of anecdotal approach to evaluating interventions, however, only partially maps out the real impacts. For example, evaluations carried out by the ISEOR research center demonstrate that cutting visible costs in the short run often results in hidden costs increase in far higher proportion than savings on visible costs. This is particularly due to the impacts of cost cutting on loss of skills and/or low morale. Another example is the hidden impacts of an intervention. When an intervention triggers a lot of development actions, it seemingly results in higher costs, because a large amount of time is devoted to sustainable performance as opposed to immediate results only. Such a development is only partly considered as an investment, while the impacts of the intervention do create potential profitability in the following years, hence underestimating the impacts of the intervention. Managers might then be prone to reduce the cost of intervention, which might be detrimental to the project's overall coherence when doing away with key components, such as an accompaniment of the intervention by external interveners.