One of the patterns that shows up in technology investment conversations I've been part of is the moment when a senior leader asks, in some form, "what's the return on this." It's frequently the moment when good investment cases get translated into bad ones, because the IT leader answering it tends to default to dollar framing whether or not dollar framing is the right way to describe what the investment actually does.
This is a small craft problem with substantial consequences. The way you frame return shapes how the investment gets evaluated. The wrong framing produces investment cases that sound credible but obscure what's actually being decided. The right framing produces investment cases that meet executives where they actually make decisions, which is not always the same place the spreadsheet lives.
This post is about the framing work specifically. Not how to calculate return, which is its own discipline, and I should probably write as a follow up to this post at some point. How to present return in language that executives can engage with productively, when the thing you're trying to capture isn't reducible to cash savings.
The reflex to express everything as dollars has a few different sources:
Some of it is genuine financial discipline. Organizations that don't ask "what's the return" on capital investments get into trouble fast, and the financial framing is the most legible version of that question. Asking a CFO to evaluate a project without any financial anchoring is asking them to do their job with one hand tied. The reflex toward dollars is partly correct.
Some of it is institutional habit. Investment review processes are usually owned by finance functions, the templates ask for dollar figures, and the discipline of filling those templates produces a pressure to put numbers in the boxes whether or not the numbers reflect what's actually being decided. The boxes get filled. The discipline of the boxes overrides the discipline of the analysis.
Some of it is signaling. An IT leader who presents a project without dollar figures risks being read as unable to make a financial case. The dollar framing demonstrates that you can play the game the institution expects you to play. Even when the dollar figures are weak or invented, having them on the page signals competence.
And some of it is the failure of the alternative. When IT leaders try to present non-dollar returns, the typical result is a sentence like "this improves our security posture" or "this enables future capability" or "this reduces operational friction", claims that are true but vague, and that don't give executives anything to evaluate against. The vagueness of the non-dollar framing is what produces the retreat to dollar framing, even when the dollars are fiction.
The problem with the reflex is that a significant portion of technology investments don't reduce cleanly to dollars saved. They produce capability, reduce risk, build optionality, retain talent, or shift the institution's competitive position in ways that have real economic consequences but also resist precise quantification. When those investments get forced into dollar framing, two things happen: the dollar figures get fabricated, usually with optimistic assumptions buried in the spreadsheet. And the actual return, the thing that makes the investment worth making, gets obscured by the financial veneer.
What this looks like in practice is worth walking through. A few common categories of technology investment that defeat dollar framing:
Capability investments. A new data platform, a security operations center, a development environment upgrade. The return is what the institution can now do that it could not do before. The dollar value of "now we can answer questions about enrollment trends in days instead of weeks" depends on what decisions get made differently, which depends on what the leadership team does with the information, which is genuinely unknowable in advance. The honest return is the capability. The dollar figure is a guess about what the capability will be used for.
Risk reduction. Endpoint detection, vendor risk management, business continuity planning. The return is the cost of an event that doesn't happen. Calculating expected loss times probability times mitigation effectiveness produces a number, but the number is more confident than the underlying analysis warrants. The honest return is the change in exposure profile. The dollar figure is the change in exposure profile multiplied by guesses.
Foundational infrastructure. Identity systems, networking refreshes, core platform replacements. The return is the elimination of a category of constraint on future work. The dollar figure is whatever the IT function can defend in the spreadsheet, which is usually some combination of avoided licensing, avoided headcount, and avoided incident cost. The honest return is the optionality the new infrastructure creates, most of which won't be exercised in ways anyone can predict.
Talent and retention investments. Tooling that makes the work less miserable, training programs, role redesigns. The return is what your team can do, how long they stay, and what kind of people you can attract. The dollar figure is some attempt to value retention against replacement cost, which is real but understates the actual return because it doesn't capture the productivity differential between a stable senior team and a high-turnover one.
In each of these categories, the dollar framing isn't wrong exactly. It captures one dimension of return. But it's an incomplete framing, and when it's presented as the framing, it leads executives to evaluate the investment against the wrong criteria.
The fix is to present dollar framing alongside other framings, in a way that lets executives engage with the full shape of the return rather than collapsing the analysis to a single dimension. Dollar framing stays. What changes is what surrounds it.
A few practical moves.
Lead with what the investment enables. Most technology investment cases lead with the cost and try to justify the cost with benefits. The framing is backwards. The investment is being made because the institution wants to be able to do something it currently can't do, or wants to reduce a risk it's currently carrying, or wants to position itself for something it's not yet positioned for. Start there. Cost is a constraint on the decision rather than the subject of it.
Name the dimensions of return explicitly. "This investment produces returns along three dimensions: direct cost impact, capability, and risk profile. The direct cost impact is X. The capability change is Y. The risk profile change is Z." Doing this separates the dimensions instead of mashing them into a single number. It also gives executives language for what they're evaluating, which lets them ask better questions.
Quantify what's actually quantifiable, and stop there. If you can credibly defend a $40,000 reduction in vendor licensing, say $40,000. Don't extend the calculation into "and approximately $200,000 in soft savings from improved efficiency." The soft savings calculation is fiction and executives know it. The credibility of the hard number is undermined by the soft number sitting next to it. Honest small numbers are better than dishonest large numbers.
Describe non-quantifiable returns precisely. "Reduces our exposure to a class of vendor lock-in we currently experience with X" is precise. "Enables us to evaluate alternatives without contract renegotiation" is precise. "Provides strategic flexibility" is vague. The non-quantifiable framing has to be as specific as the quantifiable framing or it reads as throat-clearing. Specificity is what makes non-dollar returns actionable for executives.
Use the comparison frame. "Investing in this produces a return profile of X capability gain, Y cost impact, and Z risk reduction. Not investing produces a return profile of A capability gap, B avoided cost, and C continued risk exposure." Executives are usually choosing between investments rather than evaluating investments in isolation. The comparison frame gives them the material they need to make that choice.
Match the framing to the audience. A CFO is going to be most engaged by the cost and risk dimensions. A CEO is going to be most engaged by the capability and competitive dimensions. A board chair is going to be most engaged by the risk and trajectory dimensions. The same investment can be presented in different orderings to different audiences without changing the underlying analysis. The ordering is part of the framing.
Resist the urge to invent metrics. The world is currently full of bespoke return frameworks, often with three-letter acronyms, that promise to capture non-financial returns in quantified form. Most of them are vendor-driven and don't survive contact with actual evaluation. If you're going to use a quantitative framing, use one that an outside auditor could defend. If you can't, use precise qualitative language. Inventing a measurement methodology to make a non-quantifiable return look quantifiable is worse than admitting the return is non-quantifiable.
The deeper move underneath all of this is treating executive stakeholders as adults capable of engaging with complexity. The dollar framing persists partly because IT leaders believe executives can only process financial information. That's mostly not true. Executives at the level you're presenting to are accustomed to making decisions with incomplete information across multiple dimensions. They know that the dollar figures in any technology investment case are part fiction. The pretense that they're not is a kind of mutual condescension that produces worse decisions than honest engagement would.
A skilled investment case respects the audience by giving them the actual shape of the decision. Here's what we want to do. Here's what it costs. Here's what we get back in cash terms, conservatively estimated. Here's what we get back in capability terms. Here's what we get back in risk terms. Here's what we don't get back. Here's what we'd be deciding to not do if we made this investment. Now you have what you need to decide.
The executives I've worked with respond well to this framing. They've seen enough investment cases dressed in fabricated financial precision to recognize honest analysis when it's presented to them. The IT leaders who present this way tend to have higher hit rates on their investment requests, not because the analysis is more favorable, but because the analysis is more credible. Credibility compounds. The investment case that lands today shapes how the next investment case from the same leader gets received.
The dollar reflex is comfortable because it lets everyone in the room pretend the decision is more rigorous than it actually is. The harder work is acknowledging that some returns aren't dollars, naming them precisely, and trusting the audience to engage with the analysis as it actually exists. That's the framing work. Financial discipline stays; what changes is that the discipline gets done honestly, alongside the other disciplines that matter for the actual decision being made.
— Chris