IT as Cost Center

This is what happens when you treat IT as a cost center.

Always a cost center until it isn't. Typical short sighted management.

Well, why not? IT is a cost center after all /s

software engineers are also a cost centers.

> The mainframe apps were a cost center the company sought to minimize.a bit off topic, but this is a huge thing that I at least didn't pick up on across jobs for many years - for accounting reasons, many firms will always see what your team is doing as an 'expense' to be 'minimized', no matter what you do, and in many cases, there is nothing you, or your manager, or even your managers manager can do to change this, since it is often decided at the highest levels o

Someone recently commented, here on HN or elsewhere, that IT is often viewed as a cost center, not a profit center.Anyone who has spent any significant amount of time in corporate life knows what happens to cost centers. They are at best "tolerated" and are squeezed as hard as they can be. Anytime the bottom line needs a bump, the first thing requested is a list of "cost centers".(I typed a bunch more, but I think I'll leave it at the above, for our mutual benefit.)

Why do you think they are not considered cost centers?

There are companies that don't view Development work as the "cost" center for the business, but much more directly as the "Profit" center of the business. This is not necessarily the norm, and certainly not in certain industries like Education or especially Hospitals, or Law where IT are basically seen as second class citizens (however well they may be compensated).

A cost centre is, by definition, somewhere that only produces costs and is never attributed with any revenue or profit.A smart management team can figure out that investing in IT, Software, etc is going to have a positive ROI overall by increasing efficiency among other things.Unfortunately my experience (and many others') is that only the balance sheet will be considered and the goal will always be to reduce the costs in cost centres as much as possible.Even in a company that does

From a management perspective a company where software is not the product makes the software team is what's called a cost center. And companies love cutting costs. At a company where software is the product, the software team would be treated more as a profit center. In general, you want to be in a profit center, not a cost center. Hell, half our homework in accounting 102 was problem sets calculating if it was economically beneficial to outsource a given cost center - even at the most basi