DDDigital Direction
Available through IT Raven
- Network and Voice
- Mobility and IoT
Digital Direction is a Chicago telecom management firm that audits, negotiates and runs a company's telecom and mobile services with its own staff. Founded in 2001, it draws a clear line about what it is: neither a software vendor nor a call center, but telecom specialists who take on one-off projects and everyday management. The work spans sourcing carrier services and negotiating contracts, auditing bills against contracts and inventory, validating monthly invoices, and handling the moves, adds, changes, escalations and trouble tickets that come with running telecom, with PMI-certified project managers running deployments end to end. It backs the labor with its own cloud platform, TrackTEM, as the system of record for invoices, inventory and contracts. For a buyer, Digital Direction is the team that takes telecom off IT's plate and gets the bills right.
Best for
- Companies that already run a telecom expense platform but suspect it is missing things, since Digital Direction says most systems it has reviewed carried inaccurate inventory.
- Multi-site, multi-carrier organizations in the middle of a merger, an office consolidation or a contract renewal that need the whole estate re-examined rather than kept ticking.
- IT and finance teams whose hours go to carrier billing and ticket handling instead of project work.
- Enterprises running a network modernization or carrier consolidation across many sites that want a project manager who chases the carriers, not a tracking dashboard.
- Companies whose mobile spend has grown noisy through hiring surges or acquisitions and want continuous oversight bundled with their wireline expense management.
A company with a small, simple telecom footprint and no billing complexity gains less from a dedicated telecom management firm.
What they offer
Telecom Expense Management. TrackTEM is Digital Direction's own platform: invoice, inventory and contract checks, an approval workflow for invoices, contract tracking, dispute handling and reporting pitched at the CFO and CIO. Around it sit the services. An audit reviews bills line by line against contracts and inventory, has the client sign off on each finding before anything is changed, then implements the fixes and reviews the first bill after they take effect to confirm the carrier applied them. Cost optimization is a triggered project rather than a subscription: circuit and bandwidth sizing, a network architecture review, standardizing mobile plans and devices, and a staged rollout with carrier negotiations sequenced into it. Procurement runs RFPs and proposal comparisons across carriers before signature. Order management owns each request from placement through install, cutover and confirmed disconnect, so a canceled circuit stops reappearing on the invoice.
Business Connectivity. Telecom project management by PMI-certified managers who run a deployment from kickoff through cutover and shutdown of what it replaces, tracking dependencies across carriers, escalating when a carrier misses a date, and closing with a post-install review. The same discipline is applied to larger programs such as SD-WAN and cloud phone migrations and multi-site network builds; Digital Direction sources the circuits but owns no network.
Managed Mobility. Wireless expense management as an ongoing service: normalizing wireless invoices across carriers, flagging unused add-ons and mismatched plan tiers, tracking devices through their lifecycle and allocating mobile cost back to departments, plus a quarterly mobile optimization review of plans and usage.
Network and Voice
Business Connectivity
Mobility and IoT
Managed Mobility
Network and Voice
Telecom Expense Management
Proof
These are Digital Direction's own published, anonymized case studies. It states each result as a cost reduction; the specific figures are the company's own and are left off this page.
A global enterprise running telecom across 22 international locations through 29 carriers. Duplicate services, unused lines and thin contract visibility had built up, and roughly fifty monthly invoices were consuming IT hours. Digital Direction built one inventory across every carrier and site, then audited wireline and wireless invoices for billing errors and inactive services. The company reports the time its client's team spent managing telecom fell by 80 percent and service delivery and escalation handling improved by as much as 40 percent.
A Fortune 200 manufacturer with hundreds of locations and more than 70,000 employees. To add diversity to a global MPLS network, Digital Direction reviewed the top 215 locations, designed a redundant backup network and sourced connections site by site, then took over day-to-day moves, adds, changes and disconnects. The case study reports billing and trouble-ticket turnaround cut by 90 percent, projects implemented 40 percent faster and about 40 hours of staff time saved a week.
One of the country's largest medical group practices, with more than 30,000 professionals, 1,200 physicians and 200 locations. It hired Digital Direction to audit the work of its existing telecom expense management provider. The review covered more than 2,000 billing line items across 388 invoices tied to 199 locations.
A financial holding company with several consumer and business banks. It was being billed twice on duplicate accounts while disconnected services kept billing. Digital Direction put regular auditing in place, became the single point of contact for carrier procurement and support, and the relationship grew into a fiber network build across 264 branches, with Digital Direction staying on as telecom advisor through later acquisitions.
Good to know
- The audit is contingent by the company's own description: if it finds no credit or savings, the client owes nothing and keeps the verified inventory report. Confirm those terms in writing.
- It describes its optimization advice as carrier-agnostic and says it will guarantee savings on engagements that qualify, without publishing a number. Ask what qualifies.
- Its tenure claims run 19, 22, 23 and 24 years across different pieces, so the material spans several years to the 2026 site. Ask for current figures.
- Product names here are the company's own material.
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How buying works
The store is the easy part. Staying on the account is the job.
Anyone can show you logos. The reason to buy here is what happens on install night, and on the ticket you open nine months later.
- 01
Build your quote list
Add services and companies as you shop. No form stands between you and the shelf.
- 02
We bring back real options
A person shops the bench against your addresses, then walks you through what fits and what does not.
- 03
We handle the order and install
Paperwork, site survey, install dates, cutover night. You get one thread, not five vendors.
- 04
We stay on your account
Same team for moves, adds, tickets and the next renewal. That is the part everyone else drops.