After reading a great Network World article on IT Charge Back concepts, I thought I would opine on other concepts in making operations more of a profit center, rather than a cost center.

The easiest way to make money with your operations center is to innovate — new services that the sales department can market to existing clients.   For example, a new class of service.    This new class of service may have enhanced features like a client-side portal with multi-tenant dashboards, tighter poll cycles or threshold levels, new service-level management features, or maybe even automatic customer notifications.   Enhanced levels of service may also be a differentiator between your competition, allowing you to compete more on quality of service versus price.   Enhancing your portfolio of monitoring capabilities may offer up new business opportunities.

Another way is to automate follow-up; for example, when a customer’s bandwidth utilization is high, offer upgrades.  One customer of Monolith’s use capacity management to generate trending reports delivered to their sales staff weekly.   These reports show, by customer connection, their average/peak bandwidth utilization so that the sales staff can notify the customer of their needs and offer new services.   This ingenious process has generated a lot of positive growth business for them.

Yet another way I have seen is for smaller service providers to team up and co-source their operations together.   Productivity and value can be gained by scale.  By Consolidating multiple environments together and sharing the cost, budgets can be slashed with an increase in quality delivered.   Although this is typically done only in telecom industry, joint ventures with other sectors are possible, and it saves a lot more money than out-sourcing.

In making operations cost less and provide more value the options are plentiful.    Just on consolidation of maintenance contracts we have seen day 1 ROIs.   Here at Monolith, we are constant looking at new and innovative ways to turn operations into a profit center, and perhaps a good white paper will result from it one day.   In the meantime, we have some great examples of these in our case studies which will be coming soon when we deploy our new website.

Feel free to read one of our white papers.

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