Ops Metrics Don’t Move the Board — EBITDA Does

Let’s be honest: A board doesn’t care about Mean Time to Recovery (MTTR). Your own board will not be happy about graphs depicting MTTR improvement. 

Boards care about EBITDA.

Operational metrics like incident counts, uptime, or MTTR are not meaningless. They are essential for running technology operations effectively. They are important to the Tower Lead, the Shift Incharge, the Delivery Manager. However to the people making strategic and financial decisions — the CEO, CFO, and board — these numbers are indicators, not outcomes.

When you’re asking for budget, headcount, or technology investment, you can’t just report “we improved MTTR by 15%.” You have to connect that improvement directly to the company’s growth, profitability, or risk reduction.

The Translation Gap

This is where many technology leaders fall short. They report the metrics they live by every day without translating them into business impact. The truth is, the board speaks the language of:

• Revenue growth

• Margin expansion

• Risk mitigation

• Market advantage

If you can’t bridge the gap between operational performance and financial performance, your initiatives risk being deprioritised; no matter how valuable they actually are.

The Bridge : Ops Metrics to Financial Outcomes

Here’s how operational improvements map directly to financial value:

1. Incident Reduction → Customer Retention
   Outages and disruptions damage trust. If each major incident costs your customers (and each customer is worth millions over their lifetime) — then preventing even one high-value churn event can fund your AIOps investment many times over. Addressing the pain points of the customer is important. Understanding the customers business is important. If you do not understand the business of your customer; you have no idea what the impact of an incident can and will be. 

2. MTTR Improvement → SLA Bonuses
   Faster recovery protects SLA compliance. In many industries, that’s not just avoiding penalties; it can mean qualifying for bonus payments. Reducing recovery time is essentially generating revenue. Read the contract and understand the risk vs reward mechanism. 

3. Resource Redeployment → Project Acceleration
   Automation frees up engineering capacity. Instead of firefighting, your top talent can focus on launching new products, entering new markets, or improving customer experience. Unfortunately many automation projects do not deliver what they promise (more on this in the future) Understanding where to apply automation to improve customer experience is key; as mentioned earlier you need to know the business of the customer to be able to correctly identify high impact automation - this will not come from a ticke dump. Redeployment directly impact the EBITDA and growth.

4. Cost Optimization → Margin Growth
   Eliminating redundant tools, renegotiating contracts, or automating manual processes lowers operating costs. The savings fall straight to the bottom line.

AIOps as a Case Study

Let’s take a real-world scenario.

An IT SI implemented AIOps to reduce alert noise and accelerate root-cause analysis and to reduce effort for One High Value customer. 

Before:

• ~7-8 major incidents per quarter

• MTTR averaging 4 hours

• A quality team and L3 engineers engineers involved in incident response on rotation; plus the meetings for RCA etc. A lot of effort 

After 12 months:

• Major incidents reduced to ~2 per quarter (a ~70% drop)

• MTTR cut to 2.5 hours (a 38% improvement)

• Incident response team effort reduced, freeing redundant FTEs for revenue-generating projects

Financial Translation:

• Customer retention impact: Avoided churn worth $3.5M/year

• SLA impact: Secured $750K in bonuses

• Product acceleration: New feature launched 3 months ahead of schedule, generating $2M in incremental ARR

• Cost savings: $400K from tool consolidation

Total bottom-line impact: ~$6.65M in year one. That’s the number that matters to the board. The operational metrics tell the “how,” but the financials tell the “why.”

Building the One-Slide Answer

If your CEO walked into your office tomorrow and asked: “How’s AIOps helping the bottom line?” — could you answer in one slide?

Here’s how to structure it:

Slide Title: “AIOps Impact on EBITDA — FY2025”

Left Column: Key Operational Metrics (Before → After)

• Major Incidents: 8 → 2

• MTTR: 4h → 2.5h

• FTEs in Incident Response: Reduced

Right Column: Financial Outcomes

• Customer Retention: +$3.5M ARR saved

• SLA Bonuses: +$750K

• New Feature Launch: +$2M ARR

• Cost Optimization: +$400K

Bottom Line: Total Financial Impact = $6.65M

One glance, and the CEO sees exactly how operational improvements translated into financial value.

Why This Works

The board doesn’t operate in the world of CPU utilization, packet loss, or MTTR. They live in the world of EBITDA, net margin, and shareholder value. By reframing your metrics in financial terms, you make your work relevant to their priorities. This approach also changes how you prioritize initiatives internally. If you start every project by asking, “What is the financial outcome of improving this?”, you’ll focus on the changes that matter most to the business — not just to IT.

Moving to Storytelling

Metrics alone don’t persuade. Stories do.

A compelling board-level narrative has three elements:

1. Context — What was the challenge?

2. Action — What did we change or implement?

3. Impact — How did it affect revenue, cost, or risk?

For example:

“We implemented automated incident correlation to cut alert noise by 60%. This reduced major incidents from 8 to 2 per quarter, which prevented customer churn worth $3.5M and unlocked $750K in SLA bonuses. Combined with cost savings and accelerated product delivery, the total impact was $6.65M in year one.”

That’s far more powerful than, “We improved MTTR by ~70%.”

The Takeaway

It’s not “Ops metrics” vs. “Finance metrics.” It’s one story. The only story that matters; of how your operational excellence drives business success. If you can’t connect those dots, you’ll struggle to get buy-in. If you can, you’ll not only secure funding, you will also be seen as a business leader, not just a technical one.

The next time you prepare your Monthly, Quarterly, Hafy Yearly report, challenge yourself:

• Can I explain the financial impact in a single sentence?

• Can I show it in a single slide?

• Can I prove it with numbers that make the CFO nod?

When your metrics speak the language of ROI, EBITDA, and growth, your initiatives thrive.

Lesson: Make your operational achievements impossible to ignore by making them impossible to separate from business results.