Depends on your industry. In finance there are many, many projects which have to be done for legal compliance. There is no 'profit' for the company; the goal is to be permitted to remain in business.
Funds have to be allocated to do the project, but it brings in no new revenue. It might actually incur new costs, such as ongoing storage for audit logs.
Well, any prevented loss can also be interpreted as profit. So depending on what kind of money is at stake you can reasonably claim a cut. You provide insurance and your cut is the price of the insurance policy. It's a well established business.
Not arguing at all that things have inherent value, but the challenge is having an objective way of putting a dollar value to those activities.
For example, does a backup generator add any value if the electricity never goes out? Do you only assign it 'profit' if electricity goes out? How do you calculate the value of the downtime if electricity does go out? Does it encourage people who've worked on setting up a backup generator to 'wish' for outages?
It's a challenge. Even if you do have answers to all of these questions, there will always be levels of subjectivity resulting in politics, and the effort involved will be itself an administrative workload of which the 'profit' would be difficult to assess.
Comments
Depends on your industry. In finance there are many, many projects which have to be done for legal compliance. There is no 'profit' for the company; the goal is to be permitted to remain in business.
Funds have to be allocated to do the project, but it brings in no new revenue. It might actually incur new costs, such as ongoing storage for audit logs.
Well, any prevented loss can also be interpreted as profit. So depending on what kind of money is at stake you can reasonably claim a cut. You provide insurance and your cut is the price of the insurance policy. It's a well established business.
Not arguing at all that things have inherent value, but the challenge is having an objective way of putting a dollar value to those activities.
For example, does a backup generator add any value if the electricity never goes out? Do you only assign it 'profit' if electricity goes out? How do you calculate the value of the downtime if electricity does go out? Does it encourage people who've worked on setting up a backup generator to 'wish' for outages?
It's a challenge. Even if you do have answers to all of these questions, there will always be levels of subjectivity resulting in politics, and the effort involved will be itself an administrative workload of which the 'profit' would be difficult to assess.