When I sat down to chat with Kevin Hart, chief information officer for Level 3 Communications, this week at a trade show focused on back-office operations, I expected to talk about SOA, eTOM, CRM and an array of other tech/IT acronyms.

What I got instead was an urgent primer on how his IT team was planning to contribute to Level 3's top-line revenue and cash flow end-of-year goals.

Now it's not exactly a surprise that a C-level executive would have his eyes on corporate financial performance. That's a big part of his job description. But perhaps more than ever before the telco back office is focused on the top-line — generating new service revenue — and not just on bottom-line cost savings.

It makes sense. The back office is where the telco tracks its customers, bills for products, and configures and delivers paying services. It's the place where a service provider's business processes — the very way the telco does business — are modeled, codified and increasingly reinvented. At the core of that reinvention isn't a new network technology or marketing strategy or even an individual back-office system. More often than not it's the way a bevy of systems are linked and automated to create and deliver something entirely new and profitable.

That's why service-oriented architectures (SOAs) are so important. SOA is the platform on which these systems can be integrated. It's why emerging concepts such as horizontal service delivery platforms (which focus on service creation and exposure) and service delivery frameworks (which bring operations and business support systems into the service mix) represent more than mere buzz-phrases. They are about combining and orchestrating telco assets to generate new revenues.

And it's why back-office “transformation” projects, traditionally focused on asset retirement, system consolidation and, ultimately, bottom-line savings, are increasingly about more quickly and efficiently turning up and collecting revenue from new services.

Ultimately that's why the back office is on the hot seat more than ever before, and the telco IT folks we spoke with this week were happy to be closer to the center of that action.