Operational Drag
The ratio of non-revenue-generating tasks to total compute within a business system — the quantitative measure of how much of a company's operational capacity is consumed by work that does not directly produce output.
Operational Drag is Arco's primary metric for assessing the architectural health of a business. In a traditional service firm, it is largely invisible — masked by the appearance of activity. Meetings produce no revenue. Approval chains produce no revenue. Status updates produce no revenue. Each of these is Operational Drag, and in a legacy business they accumulate silently until they represent a substantial portion of the total cost base.
In the Log
First used: March 2026