One of the final sessions at The> Organizers’ Collaborative’s Grassroots Use of Technology Conference was Outcomes Mgmt. & Case Mgmt. for Human Service Organizations: Build, Buy, or Lease?. It started off with some interesting comments about output management and outcome management and went on to clearly lay out a framework for understanding the total cost of ownership (TCO) of different systems.

As an old IT guy, the idea of TCO was nothing new to me. However, the aspects about output and outcome management were particularly interesting to me. How do we know if the projects we are working on, or the technology we are using are getting us the most desirable outcome? We can measure output, the number of people cared for, the number of people who have signed up for a mailing list, or for a website, the number of visits that the website has had, but how do we get better at measuring meaningful change that has come about as a result of our efforts?