1.    Align IT and business goals

Managing IT costs is partly a technical issue and partly about personal relationships.

In the current cost-cutting fixated climate, it can be hard to avoid the knife even when your department is contributing positively to the company's bottom line, let alone when it isn’t seen to be delivering tangible value.

If there’s a lack of understanding as to how the IT function contributes to a business’s revenues (as was the case for many organisations back early in the new millennium), chances are that they’re going to end up facing budget cuts. Although understanding has, in many cases, improved, CIOs can and should to take steps to minimise the chances of having their budgets slashed by:

i) Organising IT costs around services and processes that are visible to the business. Obvious but essential.

ii) Establishing strong relationships and clear communication with their CFOs, explaining the risks of postponing infrastructure investments or reducing services.

iii) Keeping annual revenue and growth targets in mind and determining what IT investments are necessary to achieve them.
 
2.    Prioritise

With just about every IT department now being asked to deliver more projects and services than can be paid for by the budget available, most no longer have any choice but to pick, choose and prioritise.

The problem being, of course, that not everyone realises this. 

Accordingly, it’s up to IT to engage with the business to decide which projects take precedence and which have to join the back of the orderly queue forming outside your door.

Accordingly, it’s vital to not only determine which projects are necessities and which are “nice to haves”, but to go a step further and conduct preliminary, in-depth cost-benefit analyses of each to determine what value they offer in both the short and long term.

 
3.    Virtualise (seriously)

It may be in very real danger of developing into IT’s most repetitive and over-worked mantra, but virtualisation really ought to be a serious consideration for any business looking to shore up its service delivery capabilities as well as its costs.

Consolidating server and storage hardware will, by default, help encourage more efficient use of network resources, while the new virtualised infrastructure will reduce the need for physical machines, save money by reducing power consumption, shorten disaster recovery time, and accelerate and easy server and resource redundancy.
 
4.    Understand IT demand, supply, and behaviour

They say that you can’t know where you're going if you don’t know where you’ve come from, and the same holds true for network management and capacity planning.  Unless you’ve an idea of what normal application behaviour has been in the past, it will be difficult to gauge what will constitute acceptable performance in the future or how the network will respond to new application rollouts.

Establishing benchmarks and understanding long-term network utilisation are key in the smooth and effective evolution of the infrastructure. In addition to evaluating network performance, understanding network demand and behaviour is key to accurate long-term planning and handling new business requests.
 
5.    Police your Perimeter

Eliminating or at the very least monitoring and controlling the use of unauthorised applications and devices on the network is quite simply vital for the business looking to control or rein in its costs. Left unchecked, rogue apps and devices can quickly eat up significant bandwidth and resources needed by other, business-critical end-points and can constitute a major security threat too.

Daily network monitoring and asset tracking will help your staff to quickly identify and isolate illicit applications and appliances.
 
6.    Manage your power consumption

Despite power usage having become a major issue for the modern IT department (see the iQ Special Report beginning on page XX), surprisingly few IT directors can claim to have a real handle on how much power their infrastructures are consuming, much less on how they’re consuming it.

Wastage being one of the key considerations, management can boost both their green credentials and their bottom-lines with power-management appliances and applications such as PC power-management software, which will monitor a machine’s activities and power it down when it is not in use. Further savings can be achieved via appropriate policy implementation and management.
 
7.    Business Process Automation

With lay-offs high in both the headlines and on a hundred management agendas (and with IT department head-counts under particular scrutiny), process automation is an increasingly attractive option for many IT chiefs. Introducing, improving, or simply increasing your company’s utilisation of certain technologies – online audio and video conferencing technologies, self-service helpdesk utilities, automated customer care services – can help massively in this regard.


8.    Use Web 2.0... sparingly

While Web 2.0 is growing hugely in popularity and is certainly a powerful ally in
boosting productivity, it can also increase an organisation’s exposure to security and compliance threats.

Adopting and policing guidelines that appropriately police its use, and then educating users about the problems it can potentially cause maybe a hassle short term, but it will mitigate risk and costs in the longer term. It will also help minimise Web 2.0’s tax on your bandwidth, and the potential for security compromise and liability exposure.