IT As A Savings, Not Cost, Center

 

3. Technical currency –old IT equipment (more than 40 months old) is not inexpensive to use and maintain. Technology is rapidly changing and upgrading to fewer, newer offerings can cut overall costs by up to 50 percent by slashing electricity, facilities, personnel and software costs.

4. Eliminating duplication–not only are there duplicate applications and databases as mentioned previously, but frequently there are multiple versions of middleware and operating system software in use. It costs time, resources and real money to maintain the multiple versions. These types of expenditures should be eliminated. Additionally, there can be many copies of a single database (e.g., the customer database) in existence. Only one should be considered the primary copy and only that one should be backed up and archived.

5. Standardization–executives should build a standard hardware and software architecture that should be the norm. All new applications–whether built or bought–should be required to conform to the architecture and not be a driver of architectural change. Any exceptions should require justification and approval.

6. Better management–costs can be reduced by up to 15 percent if management tightly controls projects and expenditures and manages using the appropriate metrics. Poor management, on the other hand, leads to vampire projects (that never die) and bloated solutions.

7. Improved productivity–executives and senior technical staff should be looking for new technologies that improve productivity. New solutions come out continually and inclusion of them within the data center could slice operations budgets in half.

8. Simplicity–data centers get complex quickly. Executives need to keep it simple and use next generation hardware and software that eliminates or reduces complexity.

9. Better utilization–too many systems run at utilization levels in the single digits and frequently staff operates at low levels of utilization as well. This may have been the only choice many years ago but today it is no longer necessary.

Always Growing

IT capacity and demand tend to always grow–in some cases by double-digits–but budgets almost always have contained growth or worse, shrinkage. This requires having good governance and management controls, decent metrics, and repeatable, optimized processes. All elements must be reviewed annually with a fine-tooth comb, and having a zero-based budgeting approach is not a bad idea, either.

Other articles by Cal:

Quick—Which Is The Better IT Buy?

A Walk in the Cloud

Small Business Can Get High Availability From IT

Leasing Contracts: Not All Are Equal

15 Reasons it Makes Sense for IT to Lease

Know Your IT Total Cost Of Ownership And Its ROI