This is an active problem in my organization right now, leadership refuses to put the effort to figure out metrics for fucking anything, and then soyface when the executives ask for some proof that IT isn't a black hole of bullshit and they can't point to a single good number. Its 50/50 laziness and coddling, they both don't want to be arsed to have to use their brains long enough to figure out what the expected quality and cadence of work is, and they don't want to be 'the bad guy' by establishing hard numbers that then say teams are doing bad.
Of course, its a naive fucking approach, because identifying an issue is step one to solving it, and that rarely involves firing people. Most of the time your technical teams are competent, they're just being mismanaged or underesourced for the amount of work being asked of them. Good metrics help you identify churn and wasted time when you let business interests pull them six different ways without ever actually finishing a project, and good metrics help you identify teams that just need to be given less work at any one time, or more people to do said work with - And that's the kind of discussion thats easy to have with your higher leaders with the right numbers backing it.
Of course, they just spend endless hours in meetings trying to figure out who's doing what in an almost blind groping fashion, rather than giving those leaders some reporting and analytics 101 shit and expecting them to spend that time actually building the basic tools and frameworks to facilitate their management.
