Are we Accounting for the "Right Stuff" When We Measure Training Accountability?

I was reading an article this week on Shaun Hopkins Seminars site that caught my attention. 

The article, "How to Create Accountability for Training" presented a streamlined 6-step approach to improve accountability in this important area.

The author argues that the “closed-loop” process he presents is used by world-class organizations to ensure that employees are prepared to learn and then use what they were taught. 

What Interested me is how this “closed-loop” process still seems to be measuring the "post-training event" activities rather than the impact of training on the organization. 

If this seems like a "new" take on the traditional training evaluation spin, consider this:  At the Mid New Jersey Chapter of the ASTD, Training Directors were reminded:

“Training directors might be well advised to take the initiative and evaluate their
programs before the day of reckoning arrives”

Has the day of reckoning arrived, you might ask?  Is it imminent?

Depends on your definition of imminent...  This statement originally surfaced in "Techniques for Evaluating Training Programs", by Don Kirkpatrick that appeared in the ASTD Journal in (November, 1959)

So what should we be measuring?  The activities related to training, or the results related to those activities?  It seems so intuitive, yet one must ask why it has taken 50 years, and we still don't appear to have gotten people's attention...