OK, let’s get to the point straight away…. I believe it IS possible to cut IT costs and leave service unaffected, or even possibly improved. I’ve been considering options for desktop hardware, server environments and reducing software customisation costs.
Desktop hardware
All our existing desktop systems are either paid for and being depreciated (in which case the cash has already gone out the door) or are on some lease arrangement or other. Lease arrangements are fine for deferring cash payments, but in this age of downsizing one can be left with either an asset or a lease for something that is of no use and little second-hand value.
So I’m now wondering whether large scale rental has a place? A quick Google shows rental prices for mid-range laptops in the £6 – £9 a week range, for one-off items. As the cost of these is around the £600 mark, that doesn’t stack up! Looking further at lease arrangements with early termination options and support is another possibility; around £1100 for 3 years with support. For anyone with a sufficiently large population of laptops, this price (which includes insurance, maintenance and support) starts to look more sensible if you think that it may be possible to either reduce the ratio of desktop support staff to employees, or redeploy them to the more enterprise-specific application support areas.
Server Environments
I guess that the benefits of virtual server environments are well understood, but trying to migrate from a dedicated infrastructure to VMWare can be challenging. I’ve found that a number of the key applications which would benefit from the rapid up- and down-scalability and from the resilience and service restoration options simply aren’t supported by the vendors on virtual hardware. I’ve ended taking a middle line in such cases. For development and test environments virtualisation is worth the compromise of risk versus cost and flexibility. Production environments are a different matter, so in some cases I’ve gone “live” with limited release or proof-of-concept systems on virtual machines, or used virtual for disaster recovery, but for real load-bearing mission critical apps the only way of delivering the confidence of full vendor support has been to use dedicated hardware.
I hope this will change, since vendors should realise that under CPU based or user quantity licensing models it is in their interests not to be dependant on expensive and under-utilised dedicated kit.
Avoiding customising COTS applications, change the business instead
This is a strong statement, and like all such should be taken more as a direction for thought than a policy. Let me expand on the headline….
In the business sectors I’ve been involved with in the recent years (telco, manufacturing, outsourced support/call centre) I’ve been asked to customise commercial off-the shelf (COTS) packages. These requests have varied in complexity from changing field names to match parochial nomenclature, to changing the names of business objects – for example, renaming “customer” to “account” – right up to customising workflows to exceed the standard customisations available in the software (ticket escalation being one that comes up repeatedly).
If you want to cut costs in this area, it’s worth raising the discussion that it’s often cheaper and more future-proof to have the business change it’s nomenclature than to customise multiple pieces of software, BI solutions, reports and the like. Where workflows are involved, choosing a package that embeds industry best practise such as ITIL, eTOM, NGOSS, gives the business an opportunity to embed such practise AND to save money on systems implementation! I like a win-win situation!
Of course, it’s not that easy, but if you don’t have the discussion then your team is forever condemned to customising, difficult upgrades, expensive bug fixing and so on – all because the business (or more usually, one part of it) doesn’t want to call stuff by the same name that everybody else does. I am sceptical that nomenclature delivers business advantage, but I accept that although process can do exactly that, the discussion should still be had.