Nielsen Norman Group introduces the Recommendation-Adoption Score, or RAS, a metric developed at Cisco to quantify how much research value actually reaches end users. It was built to solve a specific failure mode: research recommendations that get acknowledged but never implemented, a gap the authors call 'research breakage.'
The core argument is structural. Vague status tracking, spreadsheet notes, and slide summaries systematically overstate adoption and hide breakage until credibility collapses. RAS treats each recommendation as an inventory unit with a traceable path, borrowing directly from retail supply chain logic. If a recommendation breaks in transit, the score tells you where and why.
The full article details how RAS is calculated and applied in practice at Cisco, including the specific scoring methodology. That operational detail is what makes this worth reading beyond the concept. The framing of research output as supply chain inventory is a model shift that has immediate implications for how UX teams report value to stakeholders.
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