Decreasing I.T.Budgets Require Employers to do More with Less
The current trend of ‘doing more with less’, particularly in information technology, requires employers to find creative ways to ensure the same standard of service to customers...
The landscape of the information technology industry has seen many shifts over the past few decades, none perhaps as challenging as ‘doing more with less’. The heightened dependence on services provided by I.T. departments means more scrutiny, both on performance and outcome. The success of a business as a whole is entirely dependent on the agility and efficacy of the I.T. department.
The current trend of ‘doing more with less’, particularly in information technology, requires employers to find creative ways to ensure the same standard of service to customers while having fewer resources to accomplish the same tasks. A systematic approach is required to meet company directives. Communicating strategy openly, streamlining or eliminating services that provide little value to customers, and rewarding high-performing staff all serve to help solve this problem.
Inevitably, there will come a time when senior leadership will face pressure to evaluate their budgets and find areas where improvement can be made. Understanding and dictating the direction of the organization is paramount to this objective. Communication should always be treated as a communal task. Corporate strategy should be advertised often, to ensure your message is understood by both managers and employees. Often, employees involved in day-to-day operations can highlight inefficiencies better than managers.
In this way, feedback should always be sought after, treating communication as a communal task where ideas are shared openly and suggestions embraced. Creating a forum that serves much like a virtual ‘suggestion box’ or having a recurring discussion on improvements that can be made are some ways companies have had success in identifying underlying issues. In every organization, there exists products or services that are the primary source of revenue and deliver the greatest benefit to customers. These products or services are responsible for the majority of profits, keeping the business afloat. In order to increase productivity and ‘do more with less’ several key questions must be asked. What work is of benefit to the organization and what can be eliminated? How do we combine services or teams to mitigate duplicate efforts? How can we determine which processes’ can be automated? If communication is open and honest, employees will help you determine the answers to these very important questions. Often there are projects or efforts that can simply be eliminated as they do not represent a significant margin of profit or any benefit to the customer. Having an established form of metrics collection and reporting will help identify these outliers. Combining the efforts of multiple teams may be beneficial, as most organizations have multiple teams doing the same work, contributing to duplicate efforts. Sharing services and resources within the infrastructure can also assist greatly in cutting cost without having an impact on staff. Cloud computing has become popular for this reason. Cloud-based I.T. infrastructure can be established in a fraction of the time, and teams can be consolidated to manage a group of assets. Most aspects of an organization can be positively impacted by automation so long as that automation saves time in the long run. Automated workflows and monitoring are often great places to start.
The current trend of ‘doing more with less’, particularly in information technology, requires employers to find creative ways to ensure the same standard of service to customers while having fewer resources to accomplish the same tasks. Communicating strategy openly, streamlining or eliminating services that provide little value to customers, and rewarding high-performing staff are all ways in which an organization can do more with less. As long as a clear plan is established and communicated, ‘doing more with less’ is a possibility, and may even make your organization more agile allowing for future growth.
For additional information or to get in contact with us please reach out to [email protected].
