IT Cost-Cutting: 2012 Style
CIOs are nesting into a
new normal.
Pressure from the economy, external vendors and the demand to offer shared services leaves CIOs looking for ways find more places for IT cost-cutting, yet all of the low hanging fruit is already gone.
It is time to buckle down and take a new look at some old things. 
- Blow up your service catalog. Often, at customers, we don't see a true business service catalog. Normally, organizations have gone to great extent to build a technical service catalog that is meaningless to the business.
These technical components are important and should be tracked, but make sure that your technical services are based on a business services catalog, filled with services which the business actually wants!
If the business doesn't value an application's uptime enough to pay for it, then you don't need to be paying for all of the supporting technical services, right? So rip apart your business service catalog and make sure you're only offering what the business needs and wants.
- Consolidate metrics. Going to one place to get one metric and 24 other places to get each of your other metrics? Quit doing that. Create a monthly scorecard for the business, one for IT and one for the CIO.
Many applications do a great job of reporting on the data associated with that application. However, we see that what most IT organizations should be watching are KPIs that are products of many of these various data sources. (iRunIT is an easy solution for this, of course!) The power of focus is a great thing. Well-structured KPIs and appropriate measurements will get you focused on the right things.
- IT Service Management (ITSM) versus IT. The world has talked a long time about IT performance, which typically measures technology performance. Quit doing that. Nobody cares.
This would be the equivalent of measuring RPMs of your motor versus measuring whether or not your car can actually drive. Get focused on IT services. Make IT Service Management somebody's job and have that person report to the CIO.
This will not save money at first. This one will take longer to pay off, but it will.
- Be a Learning Organization- There is a difference between training and learning. Hire people with a track record of learning. On their own. Creatively. Put in place some learning vehicles, such as the ongoing Performance Camps offered in our iRunIT software. This gives your team opportunity to learn as much as possible, on your team's own schedule. Celebrate failure (as long as the same mistakes are not repeated). Reward those who keep learning by promoting from within.
Don't forget to value soft skills, as well as the technical skills. How to get things done is as important as what gets done. Efficient and motivated people can make a HUGE difference in your processes.
Photo: Wonderlane