How Close are You to Your Company’s Bottom Line?

You’ve heard it a million times:

“IT is just a cost center!”

Sure, the business can’t run without the services and systems that IT offers… but when the business looks at the books, all they see in the IT column is expense, expense, expense. No wonder the business always searches for ways to slash IT budgets and cut IT jobs, creating an unstable and unfavorable environment for IT pros who want to do more than just punch the clock.

So what’s an ambitious IT pro to do when the dollar sign is the language of business, and IT is tagged as nothing but a big ticket expense?

There is only one thing you can do…

Make yourself an indispensable member
of a revenue-generating function within the business.

1. First, identify how far you are from directly supporting a revenue-generating function. You support the sales team? Great—you already directly support a highly valued function within the business. You support HR or other internal corporate functions? You’re going to have a harder time drawing a direct link between your efforts and tangible business outcomes. Not impossible, but you will need to work a little harder.
2. If you aren’t directly supporting a revenue-generating function—get closer! Even if it requires a lateral move rather than a vertical move in your next career jump. Supporting a financially valuable function within the business not only provides clearer justification for your position, it also opens you up to opportunities to discover, suggest, and implement projects that provide tangible competitive advantage and open up new avenues for growth.
3. Quantify the dollars-and-cents impact of your efforts, and communicate this impact to both your boss and your business stakeholders. Did that 5% uptime jump in the customer service platform increase retention rates? Well, how much are those newly-retained customers worth to the business? You analyzed the sales platform’s data to better identify your customers—then figure out how much new revenue that analysis will bring to the business this year. Work with your function to ballpark these numbers, and keep them close at hand—especially when you have your next meeting with your business stakeholders.

Now, Not Every IT Outcome is Quantifiable

Sometimes your efforts will help the books in difficult-to-measure ways.

Other times—no matter how you try to twist it—your actions just won’t provide a tangible addition to the bottom line.

You still need to track these achievements, so always keep a running list of all the ways your efforts help the business.

But—whenever possible—focus on creating and maximizing opportunities to produce a quantifiable impact.