Net Effect – Activity or Impact

Lots of digital activity statistics shared these days showing the adoption of Internet and other social networking apps.

It is good to see the world adopting Internet and Smart-phones, the technologies which i normally draw parallels to my career; we all started about the same time ~26 years ago.

1990’s were an interesting period..Advent of www in our lives and the excitement in most of the organizations developing the productivity apps and the dotcom era. The days of PDA – dont get any other thoughts here 🙂 we are talking about Personal Digital Assistants way before the sophisticated Siri, Cortana, Alexa and Google Assistants. The days of Simon, Newton, Palm Pilots- for those uninitiated these were some cool gadgets before the iPhones and Androids.

So huge activity stats are no doubt a feel-good factor, but it will be more interesting to look at data in terms of value creation in the world.

It is good to see the world adopting Internet and mobility, the technologies which i normally draw parallels to my career – both of which started about the same time ~26 years ago.

So huge activity stats are feel-good factor, but it will be more interesting to look at data in terms of value creation in the world.

Number of lives saved in emergencies, number of rigid bureaucratic processes or policies simplified in country/organizations, Improvement in GDP, Number of new ideas or innovations crowd sourced, impact on child education, law-enforcement cases solved, number of traditional business impacted, new employment created, growth in self-help groups etc 

With prevalence of smartphones to access the social networking and other content apps, these huge numbers in terms of usage is along the expected lines.

Activity stats are easy to get and more factual. Business/ social impact numbers are difficult to cull. However with these apps/technology maturing, the world needs to get to the outcome/impact study and not just drum-beat activity numbers.

Thoughts?