It’s a sad commentary on IT spending when panel on how to cut your budget results in a packed room. But folks are looking for cost cutting tips and obviously looking to trim expenses.
Gartner,which advocated that execs prepare to cut their technology, budgets months ago, laid out a bevy of tips to cut costs by area. According to Gartner managers should have a cost cutting team in place, an expense goal and plans that assume a sluggish economy in 2009.
Feeling good yet? Here are the best ideas from five Gartner analysts at the firm’s Emerging Technologies Conference in Las Vegas.Among the more notable ones:
Management and people:
- Cut people first. Freeze headcount, cut regional support and eliminate bonuses.
- Accelerate centralized and shared services to cut staff in business units.
- Bring in a bean counter. As if your CFO wasn’t enough, Gartner says you should “bring a qualified finance person into your IT leadership team.”
- Control unmanaged costs that can be measured and cut. Think power consumption and printing costs.
Enterprise software:
- Verify invoices.
- Kill unused software and the modules that come with them.
- “Apply more sophisticated negotiations.” I read that to mean that you shouldn’t be Waste Management.
- Introduce competition for existing products.
Infrastructure:
- Use telecom expense management services. Gartner reckons you can save 10 percent to 35 percent on your bill.
- Cut reliability by one location by “one 9.” In other words, not every location needs near 100 percent uptime. Going from 99.99% to 99.9% availability could save you 30 percent of wide area networking (WAN) expenses.
- Deploy VoIP, which saves 50 percent to 80 percent on maintenance.
Hardware and IT operations:
- Defer 2008 Windows XP PC replacements to 2009. Microsoft will be pleased with that one.
- Put off client architecture pilots.
- Use thin provisioning and date de-duplication to cut storage costs.
- Consolidate and virtualized servers.
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