When you sat down last year to draw up your 2020 budget, we’re pretty sure you didn’t envision having to cope with the exigencies of a global pandemic. We’re also pretty sure that your business continuity planning didn’t cover months of disruption with no end in sight. So if you’re staggering under financial and operational burdens, trust us, you’re not alone.
We’ve been spending a lot of time coming up with strategies to help our clients find ways to optimize IT spending. We especially like this advice about four things CIOs can do to reduce IT costs, ranked from lowest to highest potential savings:
- Identifying billing and invoicing errors. Make sure that the amounts you’re sending to vendors and requesting from customers match your agreements, and to catch any mistakes and typos. This has low to medium potential for savings, but small amounts add up.
- Rationalize maintenance spending. Are you paying for software, storage, or services you aren’t using? Go over your contracts and see what you can suspend or cancel. This has medium potential for savings – and might also help you spot upgrade opportunities.
- Adopt demand management. Cloud-based and subscription services make it easy to pay for only what you use, use only what you need, and adjust both rapidly as demand shifts. This has medium to high potential for savings depending on what services you’re currently using and how you’re using them.
- Negotiate quick wins. Your vendors are trying to cut costs and make it through the crisis, too. They probably aren’t going to give you any freebies, but they might be able to be flexible on their pricing if you offer them something like a longer contract, relaxed SLAs, or a commitment to minimum spending in return. This could save you a significant amount, and strengthen your partner relationships in the process.
All of these strategies align with our experiences about what will help small and midsize companies survive the pandemic economy and still have something left to grow on. If you’re ready to implement them – or are having a hard time achieving the level of IT savings you need – contact us for help.