IT Cost Management

Lately, a lot of companies are having trouble paying their bills. As a result, they’re trying to trim the fat in every department. Obviously, IT is no exception.

But where is that fat to be found? In many cases, the sophistication of a company’s databases, servers, and software can be directly correlated to the company’s ability to serve its customers. And it’s not as though most firms can reduce the number of employees in the department; most are already operating with a skeleton crew.

So any belt tightening must be done strategically. Some companies may have the expertise in house to figure out a more efficient way to operate. Others would do well to bring in a specialist. The idea of paying an outside provider for advice sounds paradoxical when times are tough, but Rita Strauss, central region dynamics channel manager at the Bloomington office of Microsoft, says companies can realize a significant and often speedy return on that investment.

Where to begin? We asked local experts for their thoughts. They named five key areas where IT departments may be able to reduce costs and stay competitive during these hard times.

1. Analyzing Existing Resources

The first step to making the IT department more efficient is to take an inventory of its resources. “To help the customer save money, assessments are absolutely paramount,” says Dave Lindblom, a partner at Mocha Data, a Plymouth-based IT consulting company. “If you don’t know what you have, how do you know where you are going? We’ve come across numerous customers that would be thinking about adding a bunch of servers, when in reality they already had enough servers. To avoid that kind of thing, we come in and take inventory. Then we set out to understand, right down to the megahertz, what they need in terms of memory and everything else. From there, we can help them build a three- to five-year plan.”

He reiterates that good advice is paramount. Spending a few thousand on consulting is far better than buying $800,000 worth of servers and not using them.

Phil O’Konski, vice president of integration services at Midwave, an Eden Prairie IT services firm, says the average server at a business is only about 5 to 10 percent utilized. This happens because many business applications require their own operating systems, and one of the easiest ways to provide them is to allocate a separate server. All that extra space costs money because it drains electricity, saps efficiency, and requires people to maintain it.

Consultants may be able to help re-engineer a company’s systems to better use current capacity. They may also be able to train internal IT employees so that they have a fuller understanding of their systems’ capabilities.