4 Clipping ways of your IT budget

4 Clipping ways of your IT budget



Companies are in the vicious circle due to the facts of keeping the manpower on IT investments, the problems that they have to solve, the management issues that they handle and the costs that they have to decrease. Especially, we see the IT departments more as a cost center instead of being as a profit center. It is inevitable that every department in the company that is carrying a profit objective, should act as a profit center.
In the following, you will find 4 options to clip or to purge your IT budget.
1. Give up e-mail maintenance: e-mail problems are the most common problems in the companies where employees pushes to IT staff, in order to solve problems fastly. The email systems should be located in the robust servers. But spam files and system downs are taking too much time of the engineers. Predictions show that inhouse e-mail systems cost 75 USD per employee. That’s why, most of the companies has been outsourced their e-mail systems, and dropped this cost between 5 USDand 15 USD. Instead of buying and maintaining an Exchange server, it will be more efficient and economical to use from outsource providers by getting full time and added valued services.
2. Using applications or softwares over the Web: Instead of downloading your application to your machine, you can use over the web by “pay as you go” model. Nowadays, most of the big software companies started to migrate their products to serve over the Web. Even Microsoft is completing the works of serving and using its Office products over the Web. Using software and applications in this way, will provide savings from licence prices, installation times and other related costs. In the mean time, number of licence increases will be easier.
3. Go for the virtual phone system: Installing new PBX phone system or maintaining the existing phone sytems is a time consuming and costly subject. Getting the services from the companies who are providing internal, external, mobile phone, voice and VOIP communications will bring a very big amount of savings in the investments.
4. Downsize your IT department: Due to the problem management and the amount of service subjects , IT departments have high employee costs. Outsourcing the internal IT tasks will bring more additional savings. But, dependency of internal issues to externals may bring harder work mode. To overcome this issue, there should be a very good planning and there should be a clear definition for the required things.
In the days of high competition, dropped sales and harder conditions, take the control with the principle of “ No sales then costs must be decreased”.
Mehmet Bilginsoy – July 2008