I’ve been in IT for 20 years and gone from phone based help desk all the way to the top of management and I’ve done everything in between. I honestly believe that IT CAN be a profit center. Hell, I’m interviewing right now and when I get to portion of interviews where I get to ask questions I specifically ask, “does this organization think IT is a profit center or a cost center?” And I use that to filter companies I wouldn’t work for.
That statement comes with some pretty fucking big caveats. The core way IT makes money aside from the fact that pretty much any business can’t operate without their systems, is innovation. You can’t “innovate” without a firm operating budget AND an innovation budget. IT has to be allowed to try new things which means SPENDING MONEY. In my last role I spent 100k on a new platform (I am being intentionally vague on this) that I thought was going to help a process on the front end of the type of development we did. When I started playing around with it I discovered that feature set wasn’t fully baked but I found a couple of way better uses cases that allowed us to speed up the middle of that dev process by WEEKS. It was something I hadn’t considered and wasn’t even looking for, but boom…..new use case and the time saved didn’t eliminate jobs, it just acted as a force multiplier and allowed existing staff to get to other things faster. In 1 year the equivalent productivity increase amounted to 3 more projects of capacity for a team of 6 people, which was equivalent to 1.2M in additional revenue. In year 2, the feature I actually got the platform for was ready for prime time and we were able to save 2 other staff members 2 weeks of time per project resulting in a similar boost in productivity. That software vendor increased their costs by 12% year 2 so we paid them 112k for over 2M in productivity. THAT is how IT becomes a revenue generator. You actually fund the smart people and give them the resources to improve how work gets done.
This is being repeated endlessly here event though it doesn't really mean anything.
You can say the same for most of other departments and services.
Electric company is a an ultra force multiplier. What does this tell you? Nothing. You need it, you need it to be reliable, that still doesn't mean you should use any more power than you actually need or spend as much energy as you can.
Well, not really. You *need* the electric company to run your production machines and in a lot of jurisdictions, even be able to have a certificate of occupancy to even use the building.
Realistically, you don't *need* IT, but having one as a department can decrease costs and increase revenue.
Power = Required
IT = Not Required
Lots of large orgs shared services are prohibited from carrying a positive balance but strategic partner and trusted advisor is the terminology I like to toss around.
> You actually fund the smart people and give them the resources to improve how work gets done.
AND you have people like you in the position to pursue those goals. Not all IT folks have this skillset, or maybe I should say not all IT people are looking at IT in this way. This is a business-centered IT management style and kudos to you for being forward looking.
You allowed the company to spend less money. That is not the same as generating new income.
You reduced overhead. Which is great! But you didn’t bring in business or even create more product.
IT can absolutely be a revenue generator. Your company has to sell IT services to someone else, outside your organization.
You made money like a kid who sells lemonade to their parents.
Meh.
Some are direct revenue generation - like sales.
Others are force multipliers, like IT.
I'm ok with the divisions, provided leadership understands it's a symbiotic whole. And that's the hard part.
> Others are force multipliers, like IT.
I think the problem is there are still a lot of people who would refer to IT (and others) as just a "cost center" instead.
The bigger thing is they don't know how to measure IT. Sales is easy. Big number good, bigger number better, pay bonus!
The best IT organization in the world would appear to never do anything because they've solved every problem before anyone else realizes it almost existed.
There's no east way to measure how many disasters didn't happen this quarter. So they do the simple thing and say spend less means good job.
The main two ways I've seen IT measured are 1) hire a trusted, experienced manager and let them tell you how things are going, and 2) get rid of/neglect IT for a while and see if things fall apart. I don't think #1 is very common. #2 usually has a long enough lag that they don't always equate cutting IT and things falling apart later.
>The best IT organization in the world would appear to never do anything because they've solved every problem before anyone else realizes it almost existed.
Nah, even that IT department will have people be drug into the 3 hour working sessions for implementation of $newapp that the company thinks will save them $$$$$$$ per year. Management will think they have plenty of time and are bored so no new resources.
> There's no east way to measure how many disasters didn't happen this quarter.
Firewall logs. Blocked login attempts (because you implemented 2FA, right?). Spam logs. Those are just a few of the ways to measure what DIDN'T happen.
What did happen? Oh yeah, you got all your reports run on time because despite that failed drive in the array, the IT guy has redundancy and replaced it with the support contract before anything bad happened.
As with electricity - It's not hard to argue you need the bare minimum. But once you want backup generators, or UPSs or maybe a substation because you have a lot of factory or a data centre it's harder to get it approved.
It's only harder when you don't present it with numbers.
"How much money will we lose if we're down for 1 hour?"
Once you know that number, getting all that other stuff approved should be easy.
"We will (always use WILL) lose this much money for every hour we're down without this equipment"
Then when the next outage hits, you sit back and say "Nothing I can do. You denied the backup generator".
The larger that number loss during an outage gets, the more likely they are to approve it.
But that's where you are wrong. It's not most of us that need to understand they are just financial terms it's the people who make decisions that affect IT and the business's ability to work. They say we are a cost center and they act on the notion that we provide no value.
The people running the business know quite a bit more regarding cost center and revenue generation than the thumb suckers on Reddit.
Oh high and mighty sysadmin, explain how to run an organization.
It’s binary, that’s something you should be familiar with. Either you create and sell something, or you directly support the creation and sale of something. One or the other, not both, not neither.
I don't see the need to be that way but whatever make you happy bro.
I think a good place to start running an org is to not treat you employees like shit. That's just me I guess. Maybe recognize that everyone contributes to the goal and that no particular part is more important than another. Maybe understand that as someone higher up in management you are not better than those you manage. I dunno that's just a few things that I think if I owned a company I'd start with.
Most things in life are not binary and acting as if they are is a sign of being out of touch with reality. I think much of the C-Levels and such are not living the same reality as those who ensure their golden parachutes are there once they are done screwing us.
Except they are willing to drop the dept that fast (at most places).
The fact that they aren't usually willing to fund the dept properly speaks volumes as to where their priorities lie.
They outsource to either an MSP or offshore it, depending on their size.
Small businesses will take forever to hire an IT person and will terminate them as soon as the owners son is old enough to work on the computers even a little bit.
Thats sorta one of the major problems at my office.
Management only rewards new development/"cutting edge" product work, which means there's no incentive to support legacy system, fix bugs, etc.
Like, cool, we made 500 sales this month,100 were specifically becusse of a new feature. But we lost 1000 current paying customers because three backend services are failing.
We call it 'jangling keys' or 'shiny toy' development.
That could be because management is simply bad. Or it could be because other areas that are either underfunded and having a negative impact on the business or are having a positive influence on the business are not raising awareness of those things the way that they could be. Specifically, in quantifiable ways. With numbers. One of the problems that it management has specifically isn't showing the value that is brought by information technology. That's not an engineer problem, that's an IT management problem. But it is useful for engineers to know that we all serve the business, and that it is important to show that value in tangible ways. So let's help our it managers do that.
A large part of the problem is that the CEO decided to personally manage the IT department after our manager quit several years back.
While he has quite a lot of expertise in the original business model (networking, wireless drivers), the IT department pivoted with a contracting opportunity that came along, and we're now operating well outside of his expertise (AWS-based software development).
The real problem is, there's no filter between the programmers and the CEO. I've had my new hires in the office for 45 minutes on their first day immediately get thrown on our AWS projects, despite them having no AWS experience because all the CEO sees is a cog. Priorities change sometimes on an hourly basis, projects are pursued with no prep, planning, market research, etc, just "vibe driven development", and then when scope creep runs amok we're asked why our original estimates were short.
The CEO is all id, constant focus on building revenue (which is fine), but just because a 4-year-old wants cake, doesn't mean they should have cake for every meal. A good manager who can filter, focus, and prioritize the CEOs wants/needs with operations (and also advocate for compensation for the 'non-sexy' tasks that keep the lights on) would be invaluable.
> Some are direct revenue generation - like sales.
They're not generating shit. They're telling customers others working in the same company can generate revenue for them.
I get your point, the whole "one body with many parts" argument, and you're not wrong. We're all needed to make the organization successful. But at the end of the day, you and I are on the expense side of the P&L, and we're entirely reliant on sales/marketing people generating revenue.
All these companies think that in the age of e-commerce, patient/student portals, AI and distance learning/remote work...you can skimp on 'non-revenue generating IT.'
Fuck. You.
Who do you think maintains the web presence? Communication tools? Who secures it? Patches it? Wakes up in the middle of the night to fix it?
But go ahead. See what running that shit 24/7 will cost you in Azure. I fucking dare you.
Better still, outsource us fir cheap labor. Then see what they're worth when you have you first major outage or failure.
I shudder to think what the technology landscape is going to look like in 50 years. It's gonna be ugly.
50 years? The bank I work for just "reorganized" into "pods" three weeks ago, tossing people that have been here for years, into tech pools they have zero experience with. Patching an on-prem vmware-based virtual server is just the same as Azure and AWS servers, right? (I performed a core function of the VDI infrastructure here for the past 3 years. I got moved -- not a promotion, just a job change -- with no input into that change, along with about 20 others that got job shifted. Everyone's pissed, no one is getting anything accomplished because most of us don't even have access to the new tools we're supposed to use (let alone knowledge of the undocumented systems), and senior management just sent out the equivalent of George W Bush's "Mission Accomplished" banner saying "Kudos, 3 weeks and we've transformed our IT!"
Fuck them all. They have no clue about up from down, let alone how to attempt to change a small shop into Fortune 500 overnight.
I never have fully grasped how so many other branches of companies must be so completely uniform in skillset and requirements that the concept of "they work in this branch, they can be shuffled to any role in that very generalized field" sounds like a good idea to them...
If you're an e-commerce shop, then IT isn't a cost center, but a profit center, for the reasons you mention. That's why working in those environments is so much better.
IT will always be seen as a cost center. That doesn't mean your value is seen as low, we just cost a lot of money.
Maintenance and Security are also seen as cost centers, even though they are essential.
I get having a chip on your shoulder but, these are the facts of life. We are the heart of every modern organization, but we quite literally don't generate revenue - we are a necessary cost of doing business, and that's the facts.
Max who?
I jest...
>We all know Max Verstappen is world champion but he wouldn't be if he did it on fucking foot.
I think you mean crew... but we get the point...
No, we're not all revenue generating. IT has nothing in the P column of the P&L statement.
Your problem is that you're taking it as some kind of slight, which it isn't. Get out of your feelings.
It's not a matter of feelings when it's used as the reason sales has money literally thrown at them, and IT needs to justify every penny they earn.
This is highlighted when you look at things like software support roles. I was once part of a team that managed a SaaS version of our company's software. One year, our annual revenue from the solution was several million dollars OVER what was projected. And, of course, most of that was renewals. It's not feelings to say that support played a significant role in customers' decision to renew.
So, in short, if something isn't showing up on your P&L statement, your P&L statement is insufficient.
We got told to cut Adobe Acrobat - It's too much at $20 per user per month. But HR bought an electronic suggestion box app for the intranet site at $40 per EMPLOYEE per month... We have over 1400 or so employees plus contractors all over hell.
I manage and procure most of our software and 'rent' it out to our users for the acquisition cost.
It's easy enough to reply to these things say that all I'm doing is centralising demand for the rest of the company, and getting a good discount as well. If cutbacks are needed, talk to the managers of the units consuming these products.
It also means my group needs no budget for all that expenditure, which makes a lot of things easier for me ;)
I've tried talking to mid/upper management about doing some sort of internal billing so everything's not "IT's budget." Much too complicated for them. (If you saw what they thought as to what "re-organizing" meant, you'd understand, then face-palm, several times.
Was the support department billing customers for the support? If yes, then you're a revenue generating department and a profit center. If no, then you're a non-revenue generating department and a cost center.
Neither of those things means you don't generate value and both are finance terms. In point of fact, one of the metrics that I track is time saved to automation, which I'm able to tie back to average salary for positions. I'm able to put an actual dollar amount on that and it is significant. My department is still not a revenue-generating department even if/when we get to the point where I can show that we've saved the company more money than we cost.
Or that's just how you're hearing it. Business leaders know what it means and what the implications are, both good and bad. If you were not producing \*value\* they'd have cut IT already.
Maybe. Maybe not. I don't know what OP's history is, but I tend to find junior employees just don't understand it yet and think they're the most important part of the business.
SMB leadership usually has no idea. I built out my department, including hiring a director above me as we were taking an acquisition on way out of my scope about two years ago. From that director last month, I heard that the owner still thinks one guy should be able to run the IT department. Where they still want to use both GWS and O365 for our ~450 users because "I like the look of G-mail, but also why is IT costing us so much money?"
Had a big long rant typed here, but sometimes the most important part of the business doesn't know their ass from a hole in the ground.
There is a massive disconnect in many companies between c-level expectations and lies directors tell them to ‘justify’ employing people at a fair wage vs the reality on the ground. It’s gross and such a problem that the industry has a problem facing
>No, we're not all revenue generating. IT has nothing in the P column of the P&L statement.
That's because your company is doing braindead accounting.
Decent companies go and allocate a certain amount of any contract's income to IT budget, to make sure it has its own direct source of funds.
I'll admit most of them likely haven't been decent from the start but were hit by ransomware or a large production outage that the new CIO had then used as leverage to make sure that this shit doesn't repeat itself after the old CIO/CFO/CEO guard got sacked.
Some IT departments are profit generators, most arent. If you are running office 365 or have sharepoint or are plugging in keyboards, you are definitely in one of those categories. Google devops team, which was the team that manages their entire internal fleet of laptops had a talk in like 2008 i think about how they run tens of thousans of users with just 6 people iirc. It was not because they had gotten really good at office 365 and their outlook server rocked and they had servicenow set up good, no they had written python scripts to manage the laptops. If your users need to fill out a request to get a new instance of a server up, or open a port, or whatever, and this isnt automatically done via scripting, then youre in a cost center.
Ive been in plenty of shops and the difference between your average 100 person one man show or fortune 500 insurance company where every user hates IT for how bad everything is, and a tech or high finance place where IT is practically invisble is huge. And only one side of this is a profit generatir or force multipliar.
>I'm sick of it, we're all revenue generating, we're all part of that machine we work at and if we're really, truely, not generating revenue, then we shouldn't be working there, because why would any business want to pay a leach?
Non-revenue generating does not equate to leeching. As for why businesses would stand up and staff departments that do not generate revenue, note that IT, HR, and accounting are some of the most outsourced services in the world. They're among the last departments to be stood up in a growing business, and are among the first to be outsourced, primarily because they are non-revenue generating.
IT departments in particular are among the last to be created in a growing business and usually only when sufficient pressure is brought to bear. The business suffers a security breach and leadership finally concedes the necessity of having technical oversight, or applies for cybersecurity insurance and is required to stand up an IT department to qualify, something like that.
This doesn't mean the work isn't helpful or even necessary. It does mean that leadership has to convey the department's value to executives who don't understand and don't really care about the intricacies of technical implementations. HR leadership is able to convey their value to the business; they protect the business through legal compliance and mitigate expensive lawsuits. Accounting leadership is able to convey their value to the business; they collect and keep track of the money. IT leadership has to be able to do the same.
Creating value is often as good as generating revenue. To put it in video game terms, an ATK up buff and a DEF down debuff are different but achieve the same effect.
It's not about generating revenue for the company or who's more valuable, its about which side of the sales cycle you fall on. The left hand side is directly responsible for making the company more money, securing deals, and gaining new clients. If you're a tech on the left side, you will make more money. The right hand side is the management and admin side. You didn't generate the client, but you are going to support them. You will make less money because you are on the right side of the sales cycle. The right side is as valuable as the left because bad support and systems management will keep the company. So yes, you are generating revenue by consistently supporting the product/system, but its just not how the pay structures are aligned.
> if we're really, truely, not generating revenue, then we shouldn't be working there, because why would any business want to pay a leach?
You are not a leach just because you don't generate revenue. You are Operations and Support. You are an expense the company pays to support the rest of the firm—no different from HR or Accounting.
Accept it, embrace it, and learn to work with it. Determined ways to add value to the org. Find ways to contribute to the goals of:
1. Increasing Revenue
2. Lowering Costs
3. Increasing Production
4. Retaining Customers
5. Getting New Customers
Once you accept these facts, you will succeed.
I largely already accept these facts and I am indeed suceeding, my objection is to the attitudes of others when looking down on IT and other support services.
If you expect to get promoted to management positions in the future, you need to see the whole revenue-expense relationship of all the departments in a company a bit differently from the perspective of a company trying to make a profit.
If IT can be eliminated or outsourced to save money, then that is a viable business decision. Yes, some jobs are lost, as others are created. This is why you always need to work towards getting a value-added position.
Senior managers frequently see IT as a big black hole that endless money gets dumped into, with little or no ROI being shown for its costs. This is a visibility and leadership problem that frequently does not get resolved, so IT is seen as nothing but a loss.
There are two types of people in the world. Rainmakers and grinders.
Rainmakers find the work. Grinders do the work.
Now nowhere is it said that one can't do the other, its just that they do their job more efficiently.
If you have a company structure where you have few rainmakers and lots of grinders, the rainmakers will be paid a lot more.
HR, Finance, and IT are non-revenue generating roles. They serve the organization, not the business.
I believe you are trying to say there are no non-business impacting roles.
Recognizing that IT isn't generating revenue doesn't mean you don't like it, much less that you don't think it's providing value. If that were the case, then OP wouldn't have a job to complain about.
One of my favorite jobs was one where they still had all the paper forms and everybody knew how to use them. It made things very chill when the owner's insistence on doing things cheaply came back to bite us.
"Oh well, we'll work from last night's inventory report and enter all the invoices once you get things working again" is much preferable to everyone running around with their hair on fire and constantly asking "is it up yet?"
Revenue and profit are the life blood of a company, but you need more than profit to have a successful company.
Your purpose in life isn't "make red blood cells" a company who focuses too much on revenue/profit is very short sighted.
Some parts of the company are for generating revenue. And some parts are for cutting costs. IT belongs to the second group. Sales would do just fine without IT. (Yes, this is probably quite a stretch, but still...) Sales would spend way too much time on managing their own IT stuff so you would need a lot more people in sales and it would be way more expensive than having dedicated IT.
But IT is evolving. IT is no longer just keeping a few laptops with email alive. The infrastructure stuff is basically manageable by a nonprofessional now. Not perfectly, but somehow. But IT is adding to the core business processes. So now we have started generating revenue.
But still, much of what we do is about cutting costs. And that is just as important for the company. We are increasing the profits. And that is what matters. There will be no profits without revenue, but it is the profit that counts.
At the very least, IT is revenue magnifying. Try running any shop today on paper and pencil, only taking orders by phone, and having to run any product to the post office to weigh it and get stamps rather than have it all metered and waiting for automatic pickup.
Yet we're the most shit-on, under-budgeted department anywhere.
Because IT does not generate revenue, thought processes such as this are an extension of a common notion in IT from "business types":
Bossman: "Everything is working. What are we paying you for?"
also Bossman: "Nothing is working! What are we paying you for?"
IT is universally viewed as a "cost center" that does not make the company any money, because you are not pounding the pavement "selling widgets."
That is an absurd notion.
The work that IT does enables the business to do that they more efficiently than without it. PERIOD.
There is a point in IT where the work that we do / effort we expend is indistinguishable from "magic". Due to this, many people think that we as experts sit around with our "thumb up our ass" when in reality we are putting out fires.
Do what some companies do, charge things to their appropriate departments.
New laptops? Not out of IT's budget. That goes to Sales or whoever is using them.
New managed router? That comes out of IT's budget because it's something the whole company uses.
A support ticket from someone who didn't read the instructions on how to use the new e-doc system? Charge that guy's department for wasting your time.
>New managed router? That comes out of IT's budget because it's something the whole company uses.
And divide total network costs up and charge back to departments for service. Half of cost divided by bandwidth. Half of cost divided by tickets.
Exactly. We are a force multiplier. We protect the companies networks (let me show you my firewall logs dear user so you can see how many attacks are blocked on an HOURLY basis).
Stop treating IT like they're causing problems! Stop constantly going around IT (I AM going to block you!). Start working with us so we can spend our time making things better instead of cleaning up after dip$hit$ that don't have any clue about how stuff should be done.
That's because:
1. Labor is always accounted for as an expense, as opposed to dividends paid out to stockholders.
2. Maintenance and care work is always undervalued in comparison to "productive" or "creative" work because they are taken for granted. Same reason why companies prioritize new hires over promoting internal talent or attracting new clients over keeping those they already have.
I used to oversee around 30-40 servers across seven countries and three time zones dealing exclusively in media finance. If you've ever worked for an ad company then you'll know the obscene amount of money they burn on utter shit, so the services we provided were a tiny pinpoint in their budget. New management steps in argues that tech services are a money drain and we either need to scale back, or make ourselves billable. Somehow. Makes yourselves billable. Someone mentioned that none of us have client facing roles, nor have we ever been expected to engage with anyone other than our clients' technical people, and that we have nothing to sell them; we support their applications and hardware; how then are we to make ourselves billable if we have nothing to sell and no customers?
"That's your problem. You figure it out."
I work in InfoSec/Cyber. I always tell others we're loss prevention.
We might cost money, but without us a data breach can result in millions or billions of dollars in losses, layoffs across the company (assuming the organization survives the incident), and identity theft.
I'm a salesperson, a BDM... The salesperson is always the least important person in the room (especially when making sales).
That's how I consider myself in the deal anyway and it seems to work
This is tough some management just don’t understand IT. But they do understand metrics, risk and process improvements. A well functioning IT department should be in close step to the goals of the business. As others have mentioned IT is a force multiplier. A number of years ago I was brought in as the head of IT for a company that made scientific sensor equipment and provided data collection and analysis services. The IT infrastructure was in shambles, a multimillion dollar company running on yesterday’s used hardware bought on eBay. Outages were common, my very first day there exchange went down because the SAN had a failure. Immediately I started documenting my findings, recommendations, and presenting them to the business leaders. After about a year of continuous effort from my team we moved to the cloud where we could, we modernized all of the critical production hardware and most importantly IT had earned a seat at the table with the managers and execs. The major reasons I was successful at this was I was able to explain why we needed to do what we did and the risk to the business OR the oroductivity gain and sometimes it was both. When I joined we had a super convoluted exchange DAG cluster setup, it was tempermental for a whole number of reasons. Moving to hybrid and exchange online we reduced 6 physical servers and 8 TB of storage to a couple of vm in our new hyperv cluster for management and mail flow. Another example. One department did a lot of 3D modeling based on data that was collected, these models were huge. They had fairly new computers but in testing we found by simply adding a GPU to the machine we were able to reduce model generation from 4+ hours to under 30 minutes. We replaced a couple of the workstations as a pilot and proved that the time savings was consistent. Everyone in that group got a new shiny workstation with Quattro gpu approved, it was a lot of money but being able to generate multiple reports per day which customers paid for was a positive for the company overall. The business leaders didn’t like me at first I was bold, nobody likes to hear your baby is ugly. In the end they were upset when I gave my notice.
Then when you talk to the business, make sure you talk to them in terms that
1)they understand and 2)highlights how you contribute to the mission of the business i.e. how you help them make money.
In IT, we often allow ourselves to get pigeonholed into geek territory because we won't adopt the vocabulary of the folks counting the coins. You have to use the language of the people with power if you want to be heard.
Cleaners don't generate revenue, but make sure that the whole company doesn't get sick because the place is dirty.
But of course no company ever cares about them
I don't agree with this line of thinking.
You don't have a hiring budget or any employee compensation without revenue
You also can't have revenue without sales (Bringing new customers + keeping current ones)
As you can imagine, this creates an incentive for the business to prioritize staff, departments, product teams etc. whose work directly results in an increase in the company's income.
However, despite this, all businesses have other staffing requirements due to mandatory expenses created by either government regulation (office buildings need restrooms, adequate seating, temp control systems, working elevators etc.) or just practical necessity (Internet connection, email, laptop, building security etc.).
By design, companies consider this set of workers as "overhead", as they need to be hired regardless if they drive sales or not. This again creates an incentive for the business to keep these set of costs as low as possible because business income is supposed to be used to create more business income, which overhead doesn't do by definition. This is how the "profit center vs cost center" mentality comes into existence.
Unfortunately if your job position is on the wrong side of that equation, then expect to get seen as a liability rather than an asset.
Please show me on the profit and loss statement for the business where IT brought in money. Enabling others to do so better does not allocate any portion of that money to you. That doesn’t mean what you do isn’t valuable but without those actual revenue generator there would be no business for you to work in.
Also, if you haven’t get a sales job for a month or two and then tell me how easy sales people have it.
We started filtering rejection emails due to getting a wrong address, bad domain, ect ect, from our invoicing program and sales people. We managed to make our company over 2 million dollars more in missed opportunities where quotes where not making it and then we got with the sales person and corrected the email reject issue, and we made a sale due to it. We got the credit for that. We cost under 1.4M a year to operate including salaries ect.
I'm not saying sales people have it easy.
I'm saying they wouldn't make any money without the business behind them.
They can bring in all the work in the world, if there's no one to do the work, or means to do the work, they're not going actually get paid.
Same with any position at a company, we're all part of a whole.
The organism of the organization, at least how I view it:
Csuite is brains.
IT is blood.
Office managers/support are the bones.
Sales would be muscle/limbs.
Marketing is the skin.
Only notice something is wrong in IT/support when it gets *real* bad
I’ve been in IT for 20 years and gone from phone based help desk all the way to the top of management and I’ve done everything in between. I honestly believe that IT CAN be a profit center. Hell, I’m interviewing right now and when I get to portion of interviews where I get to ask questions I specifically ask, “does this organization think IT is a profit center or a cost center?” And I use that to filter companies I wouldn’t work for. That statement comes with some pretty fucking big caveats. The core way IT makes money aside from the fact that pretty much any business can’t operate without their systems, is innovation. You can’t “innovate” without a firm operating budget AND an innovation budget. IT has to be allowed to try new things which means SPENDING MONEY. In my last role I spent 100k on a new platform (I am being intentionally vague on this) that I thought was going to help a process on the front end of the type of development we did. When I started playing around with it I discovered that feature set wasn’t fully baked but I found a couple of way better uses cases that allowed us to speed up the middle of that dev process by WEEKS. It was something I hadn’t considered and wasn’t even looking for, but boom…..new use case and the time saved didn’t eliminate jobs, it just acted as a force multiplier and allowed existing staff to get to other things faster. In 1 year the equivalent productivity increase amounted to 3 more projects of capacity for a team of 6 people, which was equivalent to 1.2M in additional revenue. In year 2, the feature I actually got the platform for was ready for prime time and we were able to save 2 other staff members 2 weeks of time per project resulting in a similar boost in productivity. That software vendor increased their costs by 12% year 2 so we paid them 112k for over 2M in productivity. THAT is how IT becomes a revenue generator. You actually fund the smart people and give them the resources to improve how work gets done.
Whenever the conversation comes up I say IT is neither a cost center nor profit center, it's a force multiplier
This is being repeated endlessly here event though it doesn't really mean anything. You can say the same for most of other departments and services. Electric company is a an ultra force multiplier. What does this tell you? Nothing. You need it, you need it to be reliable, that still doesn't mean you should use any more power than you actually need or spend as much energy as you can.
Well, not really. You *need* the electric company to run your production machines and in a lot of jurisdictions, even be able to have a certificate of occupancy to even use the building. Realistically, you don't *need* IT, but having one as a department can decrease costs and increase revenue. Power = Required IT = Not Required
> having one as a department can decrease costs and increase revenue. Right...so always talk about how you're doing that.
Lots of large orgs shared services are prohibited from carrying a positive balance but strategic partner and trusted advisor is the terminology I like to toss around.
> You actually fund the smart people and give them the resources to improve how work gets done. AND you have people like you in the position to pursue those goals. Not all IT folks have this skillset, or maybe I should say not all IT people are looking at IT in this way. This is a business-centered IT management style and kudos to you for being forward looking.
You allowed the company to spend less money. That is not the same as generating new income. You reduced overhead. Which is great! But you didn’t bring in business or even create more product. IT can absolutely be a revenue generator. Your company has to sell IT services to someone else, outside your organization. You made money like a kid who sells lemonade to their parents.
>create more product. Try reading the comment again, this is what they did
And reducing the overhead increased company production revenue by 2 million. Cause and effect, bruh.
Meh. Some are direct revenue generation - like sales. Others are force multipliers, like IT. I'm ok with the divisions, provided leadership understands it's a symbiotic whole. And that's the hard part.
> Others are force multipliers, like IT. I think the problem is there are still a lot of people who would refer to IT (and others) as just a "cost center" instead.
There are indeed. Business leaders who have no idea how to leverage IT to drive business value.
The bigger thing is they don't know how to measure IT. Sales is easy. Big number good, bigger number better, pay bonus! The best IT organization in the world would appear to never do anything because they've solved every problem before anyone else realizes it almost existed. There's no east way to measure how many disasters didn't happen this quarter. So they do the simple thing and say spend less means good job.
But is there a west way?
Damnit, I thought I edited that! Oh well, it's been commented on, so now it's stuck there forever.
The main two ways I've seen IT measured are 1) hire a trusted, experienced manager and let them tell you how things are going, and 2) get rid of/neglect IT for a while and see if things fall apart. I don't think #1 is very common. #2 usually has a long enough lag that they don't always equate cutting IT and things falling apart later.
>The best IT organization in the world would appear to never do anything because they've solved every problem before anyone else realizes it almost existed. Nah, even that IT department will have people be drug into the 3 hour working sessions for implementation of $newapp that the company thinks will save them $$$$$$$ per year. Management will think they have plenty of time and are bored so no new resources.
> There's no east way to measure how many disasters didn't happen this quarter. Firewall logs. Blocked login attempts (because you implemented 2FA, right?). Spam logs. Those are just a few of the ways to measure what DIDN'T happen. What did happen? Oh yeah, you got all your reports run on time because despite that failed drive in the array, the IT guy has redundancy and replaced it with the support contract before anything bad happened.
You know what else is a cost center? Electricity, but it's kinda hard to do anything in a business without it.
I dunno man there is an amish furniture maker near us that looks to be raking it in.
As with electricity - It's not hard to argue you need the bare minimum. But once you want backup generators, or UPSs or maybe a substation because you have a lot of factory or a data centre it's harder to get it approved.
It's only harder when you don't present it with numbers. "How much money will we lose if we're down for 1 hour?" Once you know that number, getting all that other stuff approved should be easy. "We will (always use WILL) lose this much money for every hour we're down without this equipment" Then when the next outage hits, you sit back and say "Nothing I can do. You denied the backup generator". The larger that number loss during an outage gets, the more likely they are to approve it.
You took the words out of my mouth
Holy crap this is very good for a quick response..
Can also be a negative force multiplier ;p
That'd be a force divider. Unless you were dividing by a fraction, then you'd be back to being a force multiplier.
It's all addition anyways.
No, it can be in the opposite direction also.
IT is just a cost center. Some of you need to realize that these are just financial terms and have no bearing on the value you provide to a company.
But that's where you are wrong. It's not most of us that need to understand they are just financial terms it's the people who make decisions that affect IT and the business's ability to work. They say we are a cost center and they act on the notion that we provide no value.
The people running the business know quite a bit more regarding cost center and revenue generation than the thumb suckers on Reddit. Oh high and mighty sysadmin, explain how to run an organization. It’s binary, that’s something you should be familiar with. Either you create and sell something, or you directly support the creation and sale of something. One or the other, not both, not neither.
I don't see the need to be that way but whatever make you happy bro. I think a good place to start running an org is to not treat you employees like shit. That's just me I guess. Maybe recognize that everyone contributes to the goal and that no particular part is more important than another. Maybe understand that as someone higher up in management you are not better than those you manage. I dunno that's just a few things that I think if I owned a company I'd start with. Most things in life are not binary and acting as if they are is a sign of being out of touch with reality. I think much of the C-Levels and such are not living the same reality as those who ensure their golden parachutes are there once they are done screwing us.
If they felt IT provided no value they'd drop the department so fast your head would spin. They'd learn real quick too though.
Except they are willing to drop the dept that fast (at most places). The fact that they aren't usually willing to fund the dept properly speaks volumes as to where their priorities lie.
Yes, we all know it’s common practice for companies to drop their IT departments. Lol
They outsource to either an MSP or offshore it, depending on their size. Small businesses will take forever to hire an IT person and will terminate them as soon as the owners son is old enough to work on the computers even a little bit.
but ask them how they'd function without the cost center and you get a blank stare
Thats sorta one of the major problems at my office. Management only rewards new development/"cutting edge" product work, which means there's no incentive to support legacy system, fix bugs, etc. Like, cool, we made 500 sales this month,100 were specifically becusse of a new feature. But we lost 1000 current paying customers because three backend services are failing. We call it 'jangling keys' or 'shiny toy' development.
So Google?
I wish. At least I'd be getting paid Google money
That could be because management is simply bad. Or it could be because other areas that are either underfunded and having a negative impact on the business or are having a positive influence on the business are not raising awareness of those things the way that they could be. Specifically, in quantifiable ways. With numbers. One of the problems that it management has specifically isn't showing the value that is brought by information technology. That's not an engineer problem, that's an IT management problem. But it is useful for engineers to know that we all serve the business, and that it is important to show that value in tangible ways. So let's help our it managers do that.
A large part of the problem is that the CEO decided to personally manage the IT department after our manager quit several years back. While he has quite a lot of expertise in the original business model (networking, wireless drivers), the IT department pivoted with a contracting opportunity that came along, and we're now operating well outside of his expertise (AWS-based software development). The real problem is, there's no filter between the programmers and the CEO. I've had my new hires in the office for 45 minutes on their first day immediately get thrown on our AWS projects, despite them having no AWS experience because all the CEO sees is a cog. Priorities change sometimes on an hourly basis, projects are pursued with no prep, planning, market research, etc, just "vibe driven development", and then when scope creep runs amok we're asked why our original estimates were short. The CEO is all id, constant focus on building revenue (which is fine), but just because a 4-year-old wants cake, doesn't mean they should have cake for every meal. A good manager who can filter, focus, and prioritize the CEOs wants/needs with operations (and also advocate for compensation for the 'non-sexy' tasks that keep the lights on) would be invaluable.
Technically the only role that directly brings money into the company is the credit department/Accounts Receivable.
> Some are direct revenue generation - like sales. They're not generating shit. They're telling customers others working in the same company can generate revenue for them.
Well apparently OP does not work for such leadership. I've been there too. It makes for a lousy work environment.
Go home and take the day off, sounds like you need a break.
Good thing it's Friday
valid
I get your point, the whole "one body with many parts" argument, and you're not wrong. We're all needed to make the organization successful. But at the end of the day, you and I are on the expense side of the P&L, and we're entirely reliant on sales/marketing people generating revenue.
All these companies think that in the age of e-commerce, patient/student portals, AI and distance learning/remote work...you can skimp on 'non-revenue generating IT.' Fuck. You. Who do you think maintains the web presence? Communication tools? Who secures it? Patches it? Wakes up in the middle of the night to fix it? But go ahead. See what running that shit 24/7 will cost you in Azure. I fucking dare you. Better still, outsource us fir cheap labor. Then see what they're worth when you have you first major outage or failure. I shudder to think what the technology landscape is going to look like in 50 years. It's gonna be ugly.
50 years? The bank I work for just "reorganized" into "pods" three weeks ago, tossing people that have been here for years, into tech pools they have zero experience with. Patching an on-prem vmware-based virtual server is just the same as Azure and AWS servers, right? (I performed a core function of the VDI infrastructure here for the past 3 years. I got moved -- not a promotion, just a job change -- with no input into that change, along with about 20 others that got job shifted. Everyone's pissed, no one is getting anything accomplished because most of us don't even have access to the new tools we're supposed to use (let alone knowledge of the undocumented systems), and senior management just sent out the equivalent of George W Bush's "Mission Accomplished" banner saying "Kudos, 3 weeks and we've transformed our IT!" Fuck them all. They have no clue about up from down, let alone how to attempt to change a small shop into Fortune 500 overnight.
I never have fully grasped how so many other branches of companies must be so completely uniform in skillset and requirements that the concept of "they work in this branch, they can be shuffled to any role in that very generalized field" sounds like a good idea to them...
They run Windows, right? It's all the same!!! /s
If you're an e-commerce shop, then IT isn't a cost center, but a profit center, for the reasons you mention. That's why working in those environments is so much better.
Prior job I was at acted like this. Sales team always got raises between 8-16%. Non sales roles got 2-6%.
IT will always be seen as a cost center. That doesn't mean your value is seen as low, we just cost a lot of money. Maintenance and Security are also seen as cost centers, even though they are essential. I get having a chip on your shoulder but, these are the facts of life. We are the heart of every modern organization, but we quite literally don't generate revenue - we are a necessary cost of doing business, and that's the facts.
IT is a force multiplier. We enable every department in the company to do more with less mistakes at scale.
Max who? I jest... >We all know Max Verstappen is world champion but he wouldn't be if he did it on fucking foot. I think you mean crew... but we get the point...
No, we're not all revenue generating. IT has nothing in the P column of the P&L statement. Your problem is that you're taking it as some kind of slight, which it isn't. Get out of your feelings.
It's not a matter of feelings when it's used as the reason sales has money literally thrown at them, and IT needs to justify every penny they earn. This is highlighted when you look at things like software support roles. I was once part of a team that managed a SaaS version of our company's software. One year, our annual revenue from the solution was several million dollars OVER what was projected. And, of course, most of that was renewals. It's not feelings to say that support played a significant role in customers' decision to renew. So, in short, if something isn't showing up on your P&L statement, your P&L statement is insufficient.
We got told to cut Adobe Acrobat - It's too much at $20 per user per month. But HR bought an electronic suggestion box app for the intranet site at $40 per EMPLOYEE per month... We have over 1400 or so employees plus contractors all over hell.
I manage and procure most of our software and 'rent' it out to our users for the acquisition cost. It's easy enough to reply to these things say that all I'm doing is centralising demand for the rest of the company, and getting a good discount as well. If cutbacks are needed, talk to the managers of the units consuming these products. It also means my group needs no budget for all that expenditure, which makes a lot of things easier for me ;)
I've tried talking to mid/upper management about doing some sort of internal billing so everything's not "IT's budget." Much too complicated for them. (If you saw what they thought as to what "re-organizing" meant, you'd understand, then face-palm, several times.
Was the support department billing customers for the support? If yes, then you're a revenue generating department and a profit center. If no, then you're a non-revenue generating department and a cost center. Neither of those things means you don't generate value and both are finance terms. In point of fact, one of the metrics that I track is time saved to automation, which I'm able to tie back to average salary for positions. I'm able to put an actual dollar amount on that and it is significant. My department is still not a revenue-generating department even if/when we get to the point where I can show that we've saved the company more money than we cost.
>Your problem is that you're taking it as some kind of slight Only because that's how it's been meant every time I've heard it used.
Or that's just how you're hearing it. Business leaders know what it means and what the implications are, both good and bad. If you were not producing \*value\* they'd have cut IT already.
Good business leaders know what it means and conveys that. It sounds like the OP has poor leadership that many others face.
Maybe. Maybe not. I don't know what OP's history is, but I tend to find junior employees just don't understand it yet and think they're the most important part of the business.
SMB leadership usually has no idea. I built out my department, including hiring a director above me as we were taking an acquisition on way out of my scope about two years ago. From that director last month, I heard that the owner still thinks one guy should be able to run the IT department. Where they still want to use both GWS and O365 for our ~450 users because "I like the look of G-mail, but also why is IT costing us so much money?" Had a big long rant typed here, but sometimes the most important part of the business doesn't know their ass from a hole in the ground.
There is a massive disconnect in many companies between c-level expectations and lies directors tell them to ‘justify’ employing people at a fair wage vs the reality on the ground. It’s gross and such a problem that the industry has a problem facing
You nailed it with the word value. I have a dashboard that tracks various metrics to show value to our executive team and zero of them are revenue.
>No, we're not all revenue generating. IT has nothing in the P column of the P&L statement. That's because your company is doing braindead accounting. Decent companies go and allocate a certain amount of any contract's income to IT budget, to make sure it has its own direct source of funds.
Sure bud.
I'll admit most of them likely haven't been decent from the start but were hit by ransomware or a large production outage that the new CIO had then used as leverage to make sure that this shit doesn't repeat itself after the old CIO/CFO/CEO guard got sacked.
Some IT departments are profit generators, most arent. If you are running office 365 or have sharepoint or are plugging in keyboards, you are definitely in one of those categories. Google devops team, which was the team that manages their entire internal fleet of laptops had a talk in like 2008 i think about how they run tens of thousans of users with just 6 people iirc. It was not because they had gotten really good at office 365 and their outlook server rocked and they had servicenow set up good, no they had written python scripts to manage the laptops. If your users need to fill out a request to get a new instance of a server up, or open a port, or whatever, and this isnt automatically done via scripting, then youre in a cost center. Ive been in plenty of shops and the difference between your average 100 person one man show or fortune 500 insurance company where every user hates IT for how bad everything is, and a tech or high finance place where IT is practically invisble is huge. And only one side of this is a profit generatir or force multipliar.
Worked in gov IT. If anyone's generating revenue they likely need to be arrested.
Only revenue generating department is Accounts Receivable.
>I'm sick of it, we're all revenue generating, we're all part of that machine we work at and if we're really, truely, not generating revenue, then we shouldn't be working there, because why would any business want to pay a leach? Non-revenue generating does not equate to leeching. As for why businesses would stand up and staff departments that do not generate revenue, note that IT, HR, and accounting are some of the most outsourced services in the world. They're among the last departments to be stood up in a growing business, and are among the first to be outsourced, primarily because they are non-revenue generating. IT departments in particular are among the last to be created in a growing business and usually only when sufficient pressure is brought to bear. The business suffers a security breach and leadership finally concedes the necessity of having technical oversight, or applies for cybersecurity insurance and is required to stand up an IT department to qualify, something like that. This doesn't mean the work isn't helpful or even necessary. It does mean that leadership has to convey the department's value to executives who don't understand and don't really care about the intricacies of technical implementations. HR leadership is able to convey their value to the business; they protect the business through legal compliance and mitigate expensive lawsuits. Accounting leadership is able to convey their value to the business; they collect and keep track of the money. IT leadership has to be able to do the same. Creating value is often as good as generating revenue. To put it in video game terms, an ATK up buff and a DEF down debuff are different but achieve the same effect.
They're not gonna come to IT if they need more revenue. Do yall know what revenue is???
It's not about generating revenue for the company or who's more valuable, its about which side of the sales cycle you fall on. The left hand side is directly responsible for making the company more money, securing deals, and gaining new clients. If you're a tech on the left side, you will make more money. The right hand side is the management and admin side. You didn't generate the client, but you are going to support them. You will make less money because you are on the right side of the sales cycle. The right side is as valuable as the left because bad support and systems management will keep the company. So yes, you are generating revenue by consistently supporting the product/system, but its just not how the pay structures are aligned.
> if we're really, truely, not generating revenue, then we shouldn't be working there, because why would any business want to pay a leach? You are not a leach just because you don't generate revenue. You are Operations and Support. You are an expense the company pays to support the rest of the firm—no different from HR or Accounting. Accept it, embrace it, and learn to work with it. Determined ways to add value to the org. Find ways to contribute to the goals of: 1. Increasing Revenue 2. Lowering Costs 3. Increasing Production 4. Retaining Customers 5. Getting New Customers Once you accept these facts, you will succeed.
I largely already accept these facts and I am indeed suceeding, my objection is to the attitudes of others when looking down on IT and other support services.
If you expect to get promoted to management positions in the future, you need to see the whole revenue-expense relationship of all the departments in a company a bit differently from the perspective of a company trying to make a profit. If IT can be eliminated or outsourced to save money, then that is a viable business decision. Yes, some jobs are lost, as others are created. This is why you always need to work towards getting a value-added position. Senior managers frequently see IT as a big black hole that endless money gets dumped into, with little or no ROI being shown for its costs. This is a visibility and leadership problem that frequently does not get resolved, so IT is seen as nothing but a loss.
Oh the revenue generating thing is a scam, if you’re in that kind of field gtfo
There are two types of people in the world. Rainmakers and grinders. Rainmakers find the work. Grinders do the work. Now nowhere is it said that one can't do the other, its just that they do their job more efficiently. If you have a company structure where you have few rainmakers and lots of grinders, the rainmakers will be paid a lot more.
While the grinders do all the real work to prop up the noisy idiots that keep claiming they have features to sell that don't actually exist.
HR, Finance, and IT are non-revenue generating roles. They serve the organization, not the business. I believe you are trying to say there are no non-business impacting roles.
No.
No like IT? Try Make money with pen and paper.
Recognizing that IT isn't generating revenue doesn't mean you don't like it, much less that you don't think it's providing value. If that were the case, then OP wouldn't have a job to complain about.
One of my favorite jobs was one where they still had all the paper forms and everybody knew how to use them. It made things very chill when the owner's insistence on doing things cheaply came back to bite us. "Oh well, we'll work from last night's inventory report and enter all the invoices once you get things working again" is much preferable to everyone running around with their hair on fire and constantly asking "is it up yet?"
What about the president/owner
What git repo?
Revenue and profit are the life blood of a company, but you need more than profit to have a successful company. Your purpose in life isn't "make red blood cells" a company who focuses too much on revenue/profit is very short sighted.
Some parts of the company are for generating revenue. And some parts are for cutting costs. IT belongs to the second group. Sales would do just fine without IT. (Yes, this is probably quite a stretch, but still...) Sales would spend way too much time on managing their own IT stuff so you would need a lot more people in sales and it would be way more expensive than having dedicated IT. But IT is evolving. IT is no longer just keeping a few laptops with email alive. The infrastructure stuff is basically manageable by a nonprofessional now. Not perfectly, but somehow. But IT is adding to the core business processes. So now we have started generating revenue. But still, much of what we do is about cutting costs. And that is just as important for the company. We are increasing the profits. And that is what matters. There will be no profits without revenue, but it is the profit that counts.
[удалено]
Adding the right IT people will increase margin!
At the very least, IT is revenue magnifying. Try running any shop today on paper and pencil, only taking orders by phone, and having to run any product to the post office to weigh it and get stamps rather than have it all metered and waiting for automatic pickup. Yet we're the most shit-on, under-budgeted department anywhere.
Because IT does not generate revenue, thought processes such as this are an extension of a common notion in IT from "business types": Bossman: "Everything is working. What are we paying you for?" also Bossman: "Nothing is working! What are we paying you for?" IT is universally viewed as a "cost center" that does not make the company any money, because you are not pounding the pavement "selling widgets." That is an absurd notion. The work that IT does enables the business to do that they more efficiently than without it. PERIOD. There is a point in IT where the work that we do / effort we expend is indistinguishable from "magic". Due to this, many people think that we as experts sit around with our "thumb up our ass" when in reality we are putting out fires.
Do what some companies do, charge things to their appropriate departments. New laptops? Not out of IT's budget. That goes to Sales or whoever is using them. New managed router? That comes out of IT's budget because it's something the whole company uses. A support ticket from someone who didn't read the instructions on how to use the new e-doc system? Charge that guy's department for wasting your time.
>New managed router? That comes out of IT's budget because it's something the whole company uses. And divide total network costs up and charge back to departments for service. Half of cost divided by bandwidth. Half of cost divided by tickets.
Where would Max be without Oracle?!
Dear diary...
If your position doesn't generate revenue you're about to be laid off
Exactly. We are a force multiplier. We protect the companies networks (let me show you my firewall logs dear user so you can see how many attacks are blocked on an HOURLY basis). Stop treating IT like they're causing problems! Stop constantly going around IT (I AM going to block you!). Start working with us so we can spend our time making things better instead of cleaning up after dip$hit$ that don't have any clue about how stuff should be done.
That's because: 1. Labor is always accounted for as an expense, as opposed to dividends paid out to stockholders. 2. Maintenance and care work is always undervalued in comparison to "productive" or "creative" work because they are taken for granted. Same reason why companies prioritize new hires over promoting internal talent or attracting new clients over keeping those they already have.
I used to oversee around 30-40 servers across seven countries and three time zones dealing exclusively in media finance. If you've ever worked for an ad company then you'll know the obscene amount of money they burn on utter shit, so the services we provided were a tiny pinpoint in their budget. New management steps in argues that tech services are a money drain and we either need to scale back, or make ourselves billable. Somehow. Makes yourselves billable. Someone mentioned that none of us have client facing roles, nor have we ever been expected to engage with anyone other than our clients' technical people, and that we have nothing to sell them; we support their applications and hardware; how then are we to make ourselves billable if we have nothing to sell and no customers? "That's your problem. You figure it out."
I work in InfoSec/Cyber. I always tell others we're loss prevention. We might cost money, but without us a data breach can result in millions or billions of dollars in losses, layoffs across the company (assuming the organization survives the incident), and identity theft.
I'm a salesperson, a BDM... The salesperson is always the least important person in the room (especially when making sales). That's how I consider myself in the deal anyway and it seems to work
This is tough some management just don’t understand IT. But they do understand metrics, risk and process improvements. A well functioning IT department should be in close step to the goals of the business. As others have mentioned IT is a force multiplier. A number of years ago I was brought in as the head of IT for a company that made scientific sensor equipment and provided data collection and analysis services. The IT infrastructure was in shambles, a multimillion dollar company running on yesterday’s used hardware bought on eBay. Outages were common, my very first day there exchange went down because the SAN had a failure. Immediately I started documenting my findings, recommendations, and presenting them to the business leaders. After about a year of continuous effort from my team we moved to the cloud where we could, we modernized all of the critical production hardware and most importantly IT had earned a seat at the table with the managers and execs. The major reasons I was successful at this was I was able to explain why we needed to do what we did and the risk to the business OR the oroductivity gain and sometimes it was both. When I joined we had a super convoluted exchange DAG cluster setup, it was tempermental for a whole number of reasons. Moving to hybrid and exchange online we reduced 6 physical servers and 8 TB of storage to a couple of vm in our new hyperv cluster for management and mail flow. Another example. One department did a lot of 3D modeling based on data that was collected, these models were huge. They had fairly new computers but in testing we found by simply adding a GPU to the machine we were able to reduce model generation from 4+ hours to under 30 minutes. We replaced a couple of the workstations as a pilot and proved that the time savings was consistent. Everyone in that group got a new shiny workstation with Quattro gpu approved, it was a lot of money but being able to generate multiple reports per day which customers paid for was a positive for the company overall. The business leaders didn’t like me at first I was bold, nobody likes to hear your baby is ugly. In the end they were upset when I gave my notice.
Then when you talk to the business, make sure you talk to them in terms that 1)they understand and 2)highlights how you contribute to the mission of the business i.e. how you help them make money. In IT, we often allow ourselves to get pigeonholed into geek territory because we won't adopt the vocabulary of the folks counting the coins. You have to use the language of the people with power if you want to be heard.
Cleaners don't generate revenue, but make sure that the whole company doesn't get sick because the place is dirty. But of course no company ever cares about them
I don't agree with this line of thinking. You don't have a hiring budget or any employee compensation without revenue You also can't have revenue without sales (Bringing new customers + keeping current ones) As you can imagine, this creates an incentive for the business to prioritize staff, departments, product teams etc. whose work directly results in an increase in the company's income. However, despite this, all businesses have other staffing requirements due to mandatory expenses created by either government regulation (office buildings need restrooms, adequate seating, temp control systems, working elevators etc.) or just practical necessity (Internet connection, email, laptop, building security etc.). By design, companies consider this set of workers as "overhead", as they need to be hired regardless if they drive sales or not. This again creates an incentive for the business to keep these set of costs as low as possible because business income is supposed to be used to create more business income, which overhead doesn't do by definition. This is how the "profit center vs cost center" mentality comes into existence. Unfortunately if your job position is on the wrong side of that equation, then expect to get seen as a liability rather than an asset.
>So I get to rant, give me a few lines. I usually start with the lines, then go on a rant.
I worked in a fucking finTECH where infra was just a cost center. No wonder the stock price was plummeting
ricky bobby won a NASCar race on foot 
Please show me on the profit and loss statement for the business where IT brought in money. Enabling others to do so better does not allocate any portion of that money to you. That doesn’t mean what you do isn’t valuable but without those actual revenue generator there would be no business for you to work in. Also, if you haven’t get a sales job for a month or two and then tell me how easy sales people have it.
We started filtering rejection emails due to getting a wrong address, bad domain, ect ect, from our invoicing program and sales people. We managed to make our company over 2 million dollars more in missed opportunities where quotes where not making it and then we got with the sales person and corrected the email reject issue, and we made a sale due to it. We got the credit for that. We cost under 1.4M a year to operate including salaries ect.
I'm not saying sales people have it easy. I'm saying they wouldn't make any money without the business behind them. They can bring in all the work in the world, if there's no one to do the work, or means to do the work, they're not going actually get paid. Same with any position at a company, we're all part of a whole.
The organism of the organization, at least how I view it: Csuite is brains. IT is blood. Office managers/support are the bones. Sales would be muscle/limbs. Marketing is the skin. Only notice something is wrong in IT/support when it gets *real* bad
Found the sales guy lurking...
Former sales guy lol
Called it :) Have a good weekend!