Business Technology Reduce Costs – Want to know how to do more with less?
Bottom Line: If you could
cut corporate IT costs by as much as 25%-30% while retaining the same
quality of services, would you? You don't need to spend more money to
save money; no new hardware or software; no new consultants wandering
around the office sucking up your coffee. The solution is this simple: Business owners and
executives need to change the way the enterprise acquires, uses, and
manages the entire technology portfolio of goods & services—from a business
perspective—not merely a tech perspective.
"The only truly effective way to reduce tech costs and risks is to change the way you monitor tech life cycles. Buying more software, more hardware, more "stuff" isn't going to help if your business processes aren't effective. And changing those processes won't cost you a penny!"
Alan L. Plastow
We have all made enormous investments
in the technologies that we expect will help our companies operate
more efficiently. Those investments cover desktop and notebook
computers, servers, printers, PDAs, cell phones, copiers, even voice
mail systems. Other considerable IT costs include operating systems,
software, graphics, fonts—sometimes even video and audio content.
And let's not forget Internet connectivity, tech support and
consulting. Unfortunately, and statistically, we frequently realize
less than $1 in business value for every $14 dollars we spend on
tech.
But you have technology budget money to burn, don't you? (Hardly...)
Are you in the least bit interested in cutting the costs and
risks of your business technologies? The key step is for executive
management to recognize that the enterprise is leaking revenue and
take serious action re-envisioning technology portfolio management.
Consider the following:
If you knew which business processes you could adjust to gain a 1,000%
improvement in your return on invested IT capital, would you act?
If you could change a single internal software asset management process
and realize a direct increase in value of $5 to $10 for every dollar
invested, would you do it?
If you discovered that you regularly paid 50% to 60% more for a wide
range of very common technology products, would you correct the
problem?
If your company was among the 75% of corporations that over-invest in
technologies, would you move to improve?
If you discovered that you were actually paying as much as double for
your employee computers, would you change the life cycle management
process?
If you discovered that 60%-75% of the IT contracts to which your
company is legally bound are exposing the enterprise to significant
financial risk, would you take action?
The unfortunate fact is this: Virtually every technology product being
used by your company can easily represent a massive financial risk as
well as a direct risk to the reputation you worked so hard to create.
No matter how small or large your company, the issues are scalable
and apply directly to your bottom line.
Changing the way we view our
technology assets represents an enormous potential for ongoing cost
reductions—without the usual massive investment in new tech. This
entire savings potential is based on the way we manage that
tech—either as a barely controlled, and frequently hidden, expense,
or as a serious business investment.
If you discover that you are throwing away good money on ineffective
technologies, don't blame your technicians—their job is to get
everything operational and to keep it that way. The disconnect is at
the enterprise management level—recognizing the core issues and
taking proactive common sense action to optimize IT ROI. Once you
modify existing processes and procedures to address the perspective of business value, you will find an entirely new level of tech value to the
enterprise. I'm Alan Plastow and guarantee you will be pleased with the results!
