Teresa is right to be interested in the topic. Any innovation, whether technical or organisational, involves doing things that haven't been done before. This creates problems for analysis. You cannot really test people's reaction to something new without giving it them to try. It is often cheaper to try something and see, on a pilot scale, than commission consultants to talk to people about whether they think it will work.
Success proves something.
The explosive growth of Internet based communication proves that it is something that people like, and it is new. The validity of a performance indicator is diminished by its use. I will give two examples. If academic salaries are related to the number of references made to a particular academic in other journals, the result is an explosion in the number of references academics make to each other. If the popularity of new records is measured by sampling certain music shops, manufacturers have been known to give away T-Shirts in particular stores to manipulate the results.