Today’s corporate heroes are the people who can go to their bosses and say, “Look how I just saved you 15 percent.” Do you have what it takes to “do less with less,” as Infoworld’s Dan Tynan puts it in a must-read article outlining strategies for smart scrimping in the IT department? Tynan’s laundry list of 16 suggestions covers every aspect of IT from the most philosophical to the most technical.
Scale back on over-allocated services, curtail unnecessary capital expenditures, and clean house of legacy apps and orphaned software. This may be your opportunity to show the organization how it can save money using open source software, virtualization, cloud computing, or SaaS. One bit of radical thinking is to forget about the long term for now and focus on the short term.
For years, IT managers have been taught to think strategically and plan for the long term. But for many organizations, the future is now, says Joe Wolke, director of IT strategy at Forsythe Solutions Group. “A project with a significant return that won’t be realized for three to five years does not make sense if a CIO is charged with reducing costs this year,” he says. If you’re working on a complex project that spans multiple years, break it into pieces, find the parts with the biggest immediate payoffs, and implement those first, says Wolke. The world changes too quickly to bet on a long-term return that may never be realized. “You’ve got to be realistic,” he says. “There’s a danger that you could be suboptimizing for the long term, but if you’re concerned that your company might not be here for the long term, it makes sense to make that choice.”
That’s just one intriguing idea. Implement five or six of Tynan’s suggestions, and you may be well on the way to pleasing the boss.
Tags: bud, cost savings, IT budgets
