Many companies have traditionally viewed tech teams as cost centers—a necessary expense. However, as technology plays an ever-growing role in how businesses handle everything from customer outreach to streamlining internal processes, that viewpoint is evolving, with many leaders interested in hearing about the IT team’s value-add.
From protecting an organization’s invaluable digital assets to improving the customer experience to enabling remote work, there are plenty of ways a tech team provides a significant ROI. Below, 15 members of Forbes Technology Council discuss tangible data points tech leaders can share with leaders and stakeholders to clearly demonstrate the value their team’s efforts bring.
Members pictured from left to right.
Photos courtesy of the individual members.
1. Timely Project Completion Across The Company
Business leaders can track their IT team’s value by looking at how often projects and assignments are completed on time across the company. Your IT team can help improve productivity, streamline communication and introduce new tools. I suggest checking this KPI monthly and quarterly so you can see how your IT team is helping the rest of your team accomplish more with their time. – Thomas Griffin, OptinMonster
2. Growth Rates Of Tech-Forward And Tech-Laggard Companies
Technology teams are rapidly transforming from being enablers to being the primary drivers of revenue growth. Correlate the growth rates of tech companies, early adopters and laggards in the space, and you will see a clear correlation to technology’s impact on growth. – Barada Sahu, Mason
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3. IT’s Impact On Revenue Generation
The fastest way to demonstrate value is to show how IT enables secure, efficient or rapid inflow of revenue. Discussing increased compliance, reduced risk or minimized fines is important to practitioners, but it won’t turn heads in operations. Directly displaying the same data in terms of increased revenue, avoidance of lost revenue or elimination of waste-chasing spending moves the needle. – Johanna Baum, S3 Consulting
4. How The IT Team’s Outcomes Measure Up To Core Company Values And Goals
For any IT team—or, for that matter, any team that supports business scalability—it’s important to tie the team’s outcomes to the core values and goals of the company and measure themselves accordingly. For example, if a company is focused on maximizing the impact of its spending, the IT team should enable that by introducing disruptive technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning to automate redundant business processes. – Bibhakar Pandey, CX Studios
5. The Global Average Cost Of A Data Breach
We know that the global average cost of a data breach is $4.35 million—to cover ransomware fines, investigative fees, device repair and more—and that number can increase through the loss of customers and partnerships. Your technology team, and primarily cybersecurity personnel, may seem to be a cost center, but in reality, they can save your organization from devastating financial and reputational impacts. – Fred Kneip, CyberGRX
6. Each Project’s Impact On Revenue Or Costs
There isn’t a single data point to point to; each project must have its own justification, which is either aligned with increasing revenue or lowering costs. The IT team must work to demonstrate the benefits of each project along these two lines. Anything else is subjective. – Laurent Philonenko, Servion Global Solutions
7. How The Tech Team Helps Leverage The Company’s Data
Leaders across every industry are turning to their tech teams to leverage their data as a strategic asset. Technology efforts are being mapped to revenue growth, operational efficiency and managing risk. Leaders are measuring the direct dollar contribution to each of these areas. Every technological effort must contribute to at least one of these areas. – Manish Sood, Reltio, Inc.
8. How Technology Initiatives Support The Underlying Business Strategy
Tech leaders must understand the underlying business strategy and link every technology initiative to it. Measure the hard and soft benefits of each project that your team is working on, and show, with different analytics, how business results have been improved as a result of technology changes. – Cristian Paun, DuPont
9. Availability Metrics
Exhibit IT’s value with availability metrics. Availability is critical to business, enabling everything from remote work to online sales. To underscore its significance and showcase how the IT team ensures the digital experience, companies should report on organizationwide availability metrics. Then, leaders can incentivize the workforce to hit availability targets, just as they would with sales. – Phil Tee, Moogsoft
10. CX Support And Impact On Computing Costs
Tech teams can bring significant value to operations. They can boost customer happiness through responsive Tier 1 support, which drives sales. They can drive higher customer satisfaction by maintaining systems that never go down or lose data, which reduces churn. Proactive monitoring and reduction of resources in cloud environments saves real money, and identifying hot spots in runtime to help developers focus on performance improvements saves computing and data costs. – Andrew Siemer, Inventive
11. Digitization Efforts During The Pandemic
While advocating for IT teams, IT leaders can speak to the ways in which their team was instrumental in accelerating digitization efforts during Covid, enabling employees to seamlessly transition to a remote setup. Their contribution to maintaining the company’s cyber posture even as traditional boundaries expanded can be quantified and used by tech leaders to articulate the IT team’s value. – Judit Sharon, OnPage Corporation
12. The Link Between Technology Spend And Organizational Goal Achievement
The secret (or not-so-secret) answer is to demonstrate how spending on technology facilitates and enables the organization’s goals. By showing a clear map linking tech projects and investments to the achievement of strategic goals, tech teams can eliminate negative perceptions and gain a well-deserved spot at the strategic planning table. – Neil Lampton, TIAG
13. How The IT Team Supports And Enables Growth
While most of the metrics focus on keeping the lights on, IT leaders should have metrics on growth—enabling sales teams to pursue opportunities, generating leads for marketing and supporting long-term differentiation initiatives for the organization. Partnering with businesses on growth solutions and collaborating with partners to drive double-digit growth is a way for IT to show value. – Buyan Thyagarajan, Eigen X
14. Impact On Sales And Customer Relationships
If technology leaders can explain how investments (aka costs) have driven top-line growth through stickier relationships with customers or increased revenue through stronger sales numbers, they demonstrate not only the team’s value-add to the company but also their understanding of the business drivers the company is tied to. – Claire Rutkowski, Bentley Systems
15. Time To Market
One of the data points that best demonstrates the tech team’s value is time to market. Being able to launch critical products and features weeks or months faster means you can not only start generating ROI from those features faster but also accelerate your product roadmap by more quickly allocating precious tech resources to other projects. – Gleb Polyakov, Nylas