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Consolidate Service Management to Drive IT Cost Optimization
Embrace a big picture approach to move beyond cost reduction.
Your Challenge
- The Great Recession put IT leaders in a mode of frenzied cost cutting. As the recovery dragged along, IT budgets flattened and have recently increased only slowly.
- IT leaders need to optimize costs and maintain competitiveness while preserving the organization’s ability to capitalize on a potential market upswing.
- Having exhausted many of the conventional cost reduction tactics over the past several years, IT leaders have few options left for continued cost improvement.
Our Advice
Critical Insight- User classification opens the door to service tiering through identification of the real opportunities for service differentiation in the organization. It establishes a reasonable basis for multiple service tiers that goes beyond simply providing better service to the most vocal users.
- Spikes in demand for different IT services do not normally occur at the same time. Share resources across services to reduce the capacity you need to allocate up-front.
- Opening up resource purchase decisions to competitive bidding will not always bring you the strongest vendor options. Try to build multi-service vendor relationships with vendors who can cater to your user classes.
- Reduce costs while maintaining the ability to compete.
- Plan to optimize not just your current level of expenditure but also expenditures foreseeable down the road.
Get to Action
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Build a strategy for optimizing IT costs
Reduce expenses while aligning services to user needs.
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Learn about cost optimization
Build a plan for cost optimization.
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Survey your user base for usage characteristics
Drive user classification.
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Classify your user base
Derive appropriate tiers for user services.
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Plan capacity across user classes and services
Reduce the amount of resource you purchase.
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Identify opportunities for multi-vendor relationships
Build relationships with vendors that can support your user classes.
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Prioritize your cost optimization efforts
Start with the low-hanging cost optimization fruit.
Related Solution Sets
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Companies Who Helped
- Milwaukee Health Department
- Saskatoon Health Region
- WR Starkey Mortgage
- An additional ten companies contributed to this research. Due to the sensitivity of the information, their identities will be kept confidential.
Solution Road Map
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Develop Successful Strategies for Budget Planning, Proposal, and NegotiationDon't just pick a number: prepare realistic budget proposals for success.
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Manage Uncertain Project Demand with Right-Sized Resource AgilityWhen it comes to projects, be prepared for the unexpected.
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Consolidate Service Management to Drive IT Cost OptimizationEmbrace a big picture approach to move beyond cost reduction.
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