Gartner's 20 ways of cutting expenses in IT
Gartner analysts presented a list of 20 ways that IT execs can slash expenses.
- Gartner estimates that 37% of the average IT budget is dedicated to personnel, so this represents a major opportunity to save money. Gartner recommends a blend of hiring freezes, reducing or eliminating special bonuses, cutting back on outside contractors.
- Flatten the organization. A flat organization not only saves money but also can lead to more efficiency.
- Move to shared services. Consolidate things like help desk into one group that services the entire company.
- Bring a finance person into your leadership team for that person to analyze your budget and find ways to help you trim costs.
- Don't ignore "unmanaged" costs like printers or data center power. Specially DC Power.
- Make sure your vendors are charging you what your contract specifies.
- Eliminate unused software and modules.
- Think about renegotiating contracts and strategize ways to save money with vendors.
- Deploy a telecom expense-management service. It pays for itself and more.
- Deploy a corporatewide plan for buying cell phones. Then, buy a cell phone plan that optimizes expenses.
- If there are places where you don't need five nines of availability, settle for three nines.
- Consider buying a videoconferencing solution rather than constantly renting or outsourcing videoconferences.
- Where possible, use the Internet as a replacement for expensive WAN transport services. Leverage VPN Technologies.
- If your hardware is holding up, consider sticking with it another year.
- Use commodity products wherever possible.
- Consolidate and virtualize servers and infrastructure.
- Reduce storage costs via data deduplication and other methods.
- Use better processes and policy to make better use of existing tools.
- Deploy IP telephony and VoIP as a way of cutting costs.
- Harvest unused licenses and reuse them when a new employee makes a request.
(from NetworkWorld.com's article)
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