Evidence

What does it take to make your view, your opinion, your recommendation count?  In your personal life, and with friends, your opinion might be pretty solid.  You can sort of trade on your cred.  But, in business it's different.  Maybe it is because the stakes are higher but your boss does not value your opinion all that much.  It's "appreciated," but not valued.  We're probably not going to make a $100,000 decision--maybe not even a $1,000 decision--based on your opinion.  You might trade on experience or even wisdom but I can tell you first hand that these things only get you so far.

So, what to do?  Well, the boss wants evidence, third-party "proof" that your proposal makes sense, is valid, is the right thing to do.  I've offered a hierarchy of evidence elsewhere so I won't be redundant here.  Suffice it to say that you should seek to employ one or more types of evidence in your blogs for our course.  Your boss and I prefer quantitative evidence.  For example, if I ask you to state the impact of a company adopting Google Drive, you might identify several costs and cost savings, estimate a dollar amount for each, and then tell the boss (and me) the net.  Lost productivity due to inefficiencies in using Google Drive (vs., say Microsoft Office) might be 15% per employee for four months (I'm making reasonable guesses here and you may do the same).  So a negative impact would be TOTAL ANNUAL SALARY * .25 (1/4 of a year) * .15 (lost productivity).  Key point: WE MAY QUIBBLE WITH YOUR ESTIMATES BUT IF YOU HAVE THE LOGIC RIGHT YOU WIN.

I encourage you to push beyond your opinion and move to the world of evidence in support of your positions.