In my opinion, you should not tell people who do not understand how analytics will improve your caching optimization that you are working on analytics. You should tell them you are working on improving the caching layer. If you sound confident that implementing analytics is required for this job to be done properly they will have to trust you in this, _you_ are the programmer.
You are correct in your assertion that when people ask you what you are doing, they want to know what value you are providing for them. So don't answer with technical details, you already know they're not interested in that :) Whenever a business stakeholder asks you what you are doing, trace back how what you are doing provides value for them and inform them of that.
Note that value does not have to be very direct. Caching makes your application faster, its business value is that the customers are happier when using the product. It is for the marketing department to decide wether that is worth it.
I would not bother too much with figuring out the exact numbers, they are not important. You should for yourself decide wether something is useful or not, if you are an experienced programmer I think this intuition will be right. Almost always, tooling will reduce your technical debt.
Tooling is not only automation, it is also process documentation.
I appreciate this reply a lot. This type of situation is a new one for me, I guess I should just bring up the subject as a whole and see how it goes. I hope I don't run into too much resistance since it will result in a short term decrease in deliverables.
You are correct in your assertion that when people ask you what you are doing, they want to know what value you are providing for them. So don't answer with technical details, you already know they're not interested in that :) Whenever a business stakeholder asks you what you are doing, trace back how what you are doing provides value for them and inform them of that.
Note that value does not have to be very direct. Caching makes your application faster, its business value is that the customers are happier when using the product. It is for the marketing department to decide wether that is worth it.
I would not bother too much with figuring out the exact numbers, they are not important. You should for yourself decide wether something is useful or not, if you are an experienced programmer I think this intuition will be right. Almost always, tooling will reduce your technical debt.
Tooling is not only automation, it is also process documentation.