Might be interesting to have a line items for "cognitive cost of having to deal with the crappy in-house tool when you know a good SaaS alternative exists" and "time spent wrangling the finance department"
A cynic might suggest 'cognitive cost of having to use overblown SaaS tools instead of a simple list, calendar event or email/chat message' and 'time spent making additional records in or collecting vanity metrics from the SaaS to justify its continued existence' ought to be in there in the interests of balance.
I was going to say. The biggest cost for most organizations is the recruitment and training costs of an employee that leaves due to demotivation stemming from having to do "robotic" tasks.
An employee who struggles with that is, by definition, no longer at the organization.
So, there is nobody who would tell a decision-maker about that cost.
Another example:
Let's say Company Z has a mailing list with all 200 engineers on it.
Folks such as the CTO and senior leadership use it to announce important events, to send out recordings of meetings. Let's also say that the company has their alerting infrastructure set up so that whenever any service had an exception (server or browser), it emails the stacktrace to this same list.
How does this affect people? There is a wide range:
* Group A: Is naturally unbothered by it. Their inbox is always full but it is no big deal.
* Group B: Finds it to be a minor annoyance.
* Group C: Is seriously frustrated by it, but they just filter all the emails to a folder and accept that they'll miss a bunch.
* Group D: Finds it actively difficult to not pay attention to this, especially because they've heard too many stories about Alert Fatigue. They feel bad about just ignoring all alerts, including the ones for services they maintain.
Group C is going to be less productive and less tapped-in to whats going on. So they will be less influential at the company. Groups A and B are going to be more visibly productive and successful. they will gain seniority and influence. Any member of Group D who does not teach themselves to ignore the alert emails will be so unproductive that they will be fired. They certainly won't have any influence, especially if they keep bringing up niche issues like emails when there are more important things to deal with.
Therefore, from the perspective of Company Z's decision-makers (members of groups A and B), there is not really any cost to continuing to send email this way.
Oh god, those cases when you'd love to try some tool or increase the plan to go over an auditing line but no-one has the energy to push it through the bureaucracy
Hmm, cost of meetings (similar to training costs) is a good idea, definitely an issue I've seen before - thousands of dollars wasted arguing over $50/month for a tool.