TAM Benefits
Gartner's IT Cost Cutting Recommendations? You're Kidding, Right? Print E-mail
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During April of 2008, at Gartner's Emerging Technologies Conference, Gartner analysts introduced their “recommendations” for reducing the costs of the enterprise technology environment. Normally, I listen (admittedly with tongue firmly in cheek) when Gartner speaks up, but this is becoming genuinely embarrassing. Consider the following recommendations delivered, in public, by an organization that charges an obscene amount of cold hard cash for its advice.

New PDF Attached - Link at bottom of entry.

Once I've recounted Gartner's highlights, I'll explain how you can cut IT costs—in any company—without spending even more money on additional non-solutions—and without hiring yet another outside consulting or research group.

READ MY FULL SERIES—The materials in this, and my other posts, are worth serious cash to you and your company. (Or you could PAY someone for this same advice...)

Thanks to Larry Dignan, Editor in Chief of ZDNet and Editorial Director of ZDNet sister site TechRepublic, for the information contained in his post: IT cost cutting 101 (April 7, 2008).

Gartner recommends that you:

  • Cut people & freeze head counts,

  • Eliminate bonuses,

  • Bring in a finance person,

  • Control unmanaged costs,

  • Verify invoices,

  • Eliminate unused software,

  • Apply more sophisticated negotiations,

  • Introduce competition for existing technology products,

  • Defer replacing Windows XP systems until 2009,

Here are several of Gartner's recommendations—carefully modified to reflect a little more reality—along with the ideas I've been recommending for years—and I'm not charging you $5k-$30k for the “word from on high”—actually my recommendations are significantly better because they've been proven on the front lines of technology asset management.

  • Cut People? Instead of cutting people/reducing head counts, do everything you can to keep the expertise you already have in house. The costs associated with replacing these people can be enormous. Unless the employee is incredibly inept, you are better off keeping them, training them, and ensuring their loyalty than removing them.

Keep in mine that genuinely talented and genuinely loyal members of the work force are becoming more and more difficult to find...

Real World - Our friends from Gartner probably do not realize that when you dump on employees, they tend to want to dump back. Realize this: The vast majority of people trying to cash in on the $1 million software piracy whistle-blower rewards are precisely those former employees (technicians and lower management) who have been victims of cost-cutting head count reductions. And, yes, many of them will drop a dime on you in a split second—costing you six figure copyright and license non compliance fines and penalties as well as damage to your reputation.

Cost of this advice to you? NOTHING!

 
Guess why so many Information Technology Projects fail... Print E-mail
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What's wrong with this picture: The lead company technician has done an outstanding job building the initial technology infrastructure. Let's reward the effort by making the technician a project manager!

How could the scenario above possibly relate to industry statistics that indicate over 70% of technology projects are late; or over budget; or they just plain fade away into a budgetary black hole? Could it be that successful technicians; or successful software developers; or successful anything else's do not have the right stuff to be project managers?

Don't start crying "foul" quite yet. There is a solution to this universal problem--at least a potential one.  Read on for details!

 
Mercy Health Partners Cut Tech Costs by $4 Million with Technology Portfolio Management! Print E-mail
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Using effective technology portfolio management combined with technology asset management techniques, Mercy Health Partners reduced their IT costs by more than $4,000,000. Overspending on technology assets is significantly more prevalent than underspending.

You can stop throwing money away by establishing an effective technology asset management program and it can cost you virtually nothing to get the initiative off the ground. Check out our professional development programs to get back on the path of getting genuine value for your technology asset investments.
 
How much can you save with TAM? Print E-mail
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When you implement a well-considered technology asset management program--a SAM, TAM, or ITAM--your company will begin discovering an enormous range of tech-related cost reductions. Your key to serious technology cost reductions will be based in how well you plan out the technology processes and infrastructure of the initiative.
"According to industry research, as many as 75% of companies over-spend on technology acquisitions."
These unnecessary acquisitions include everything from buying too many software licenses to purchasing hardware that exceeds the technical needs or capabilities of the enterprise.  Read on for a some basic ideas on reversing the trends!
 


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