Impact Intelligence

Get More Out of your Discretionary Spend

The era of easy money for new initiatives—business, digital, or tech—has ended. Investors, analysts, and the C-Suite Core want to know exactly how these investments are paying off. In the absence of a solid answer, a CEO may come under pressure to return cash to investors in the form of dividends or buybacks. Or in the case of startups, the founder CEO might be forced to accept a colleague in the form of a Co-CEO selected by their investor.

The payoff of an investment or initiative might have been addressed in the startup's pitch deck or in the business case for an initiative. But that's only a projection, a forecast. What are the actual benefits? Most organizations, even those who conduct A/B tests and other controlled experiments for lots of little things, don't have an answer to this question. This is unsustainable in the digital age. It is a sign of poor Impact intelligence—the constant awareness of the business impact of your initiatives.

With this book, the C-Suite Core will be able to grow and sustain impact intelligence.

How?

Impact intelligence requires an ongoing process of collecting, analyzing, and using data for impact insight, not just customer insight. How do we get there? The iRex framework described in the book provides a path. It helps acquire and strengthen impact intelligence. The framework takes you through five phases:

1. Visualize Impact: Grow shared understanding.
2. Improve Justifications: No more vagueness.
3. Improve Measurements: Develop a better line of sight to business impact.
4. Validate Impact Regularly: Activate the impact-feedback loop.
5. Attribute Impact: Make claims of impact add up.
6. Invest for Impact: Use the intel from the above to decide the next round of investments.

Endorsements

An invaluable resource for CEOs, COOs, and CFOs seeking to improve return on their investments, as well as for anyone leading or sponsoring digital initiatives. Impact Intelligence shows the common pitfalls that cause these projects and their business to underperform, and it provides a thoughtful and scalable framework for improving outcomes. The book is full of insight and offers pragmatic approaches to deliver better real-world results. Highly recommended.

—David Ornstein, COO of Baton Systems and former COO of Global Markets, Barclays

As tech companies face increasing pressure to demonstrate ROI, Sriram Narayan offers practical guidance for aligning tech investments with business outcomes. The iRex framework and tools like Impact Networks and PIE profiles enable leaders to move beyond output-focused delivery to true impact-driven execution. This book is essential reading for any growth-focused tech executive looking to build a culture of continuous adaptation and learning. Sriram’s insights will help tech organizations evolve from flying blind to data-driven decision making that delivers real, measurable value. Highly recommend this.

—Keshav Meda, Co-Founder & Chief Growth Officer, SmartQ

Impact Intelligence provides a structure for leaders like me to ensure that we can actualize the return on the investments made in digital initiatives. It also helps me to structure my conversations with the CxOs and drive alignment around the business outcomes rather than just focusing on technology delivery. It elaborates the common pitfalls of delivery focus and provides a detailed model of delivering business impact in a quantifiable way. A go to resource for me every day.

—Rajesh Kumar T, Director of Digital Products at Travelopia (Holdings Limited)

Sriram Narayan's new book is a refreshing take on how to think about improvement, justification, and demonstrating progress. I especially like that he advocates for clear, causal models which he calls "impact networks". In his iRex framework, the model provides structure that helps connect the dots between realistic expectations, proximate measurable impacts, and downstream impacts with attribution back to the improvement!

—Matt Gunter, Director, Business Value Engineering at GitHub

As an IT leader this book is an essential read on how to articulate the value of technology in a quantifiable manner. It presents a framework that covers both understanding how to measure and understand tech investments as well as a guide for the execution of measurable outcomes for teams and the business value they deliver. An extremely digestable and accessible book with excellent diagrams to visualise the key concepts.

—Scott Millett, CIO, Iglu.com

The Fog of Impact

An analogy for impact intelligence.

Imagine a multiplayer video game in which players compete to shoot goblins that appear in a foggy landscape. Some goblins carry a small pouch of gold which the shooter wins on killing the goblin. The game lasts for forty minutes and the best shooter wins. But there’s a catch.

The goblins appear and disappear, and it is not easy to take aim at them through the fog. What’s more, they may take several shots to die, and it is tough to see through the fog if they are still alive. Shooters can’t get too close because the goblins disappear. The players start with a fixed amount of gold for guns, tech upgrades, and ammunition.

Here’s the secret. The key to winning the game is to earn enough gold to invest in an expensive upgrade that offers fog-piercing vision. Those who don’t realize this waste their gold on more powerful guns and more ammunition.

This game is playing out in the real world of business and digital initiatives. The goblins represent ephemeral opportunities in the market. The benefits landscape is foggy, and initiatives struggle to hit the mark unless there is adequate investment in impact intelligence in the form of tight impact-feedback loops, the equivalent of fog piercing vision.

Unfortunately, many business leaders, both Askers and Approvers among them, haven’t bought into the fog-piercing abilities of tight impact-feedback loops. They think it is too high a bar or it is only applicable to tech companies. Some of them also fear that without the fog, they’ll no longer have an excuse for their poor scores. With the fog in place, they can simply spray their guns and pray for a hit. Thus, the game continues in the fog with all the available funds spent on doing more things faster and with new tools, i.e., it is spent on new shiny tech that can fire faster and longer into the inscrutable, unyielding fog.

The book makes the case that the fog-piercing vision doesn’t have to be a super high-end upgrade in the form of controlled experiments and advanced data analysis. The iRex framework described in the book offers a mid-range upgrade with adequate fog-piercing capabilities.

Table of Contents

About the Author

Sriram Narayan is an independent consultant in the area of impact intelligence. He also helps clients improve digital, product and tech performance.

Pearson published his first book, Agile IT Org Design, in 2015. It won endorsements from the then CIO of The Vanguard Group and the then MD of Consumer Digital at Lloyds Bank.

Sriram has served in product, technology, innovation, and transformation leadership roles since 2006. Along the way, he created Cleararchy, a formulation for organizing hierarchy for the digital age and an alternative to formulations such as Holacracy and Teal organizations.

He has also helped some of his clients move to a product operating model. His write-up of the topic has become a de facto industry reference. His other writings and talks are available at agileorgdesign.com

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