Its obviously never a good idea for any organisation to be racking up unnecessary costs, but following an economic downturn there is increased pressure to minimise costs and maximise efficiency.

For many companies in the private sector the name of the game has become survival, and the public sector has come under ever increasing budgetary pressures. Organisations in both sectors face the same conundrum, how to reduce costs without adversely impacting front line services, indeed many may have to simultaneously improve services.

The good news is that these requirements do not have to be mutually incompatible, my business has a number of case studies in both private sector and local government where we have significantly saved on running costs in the course of improving internal and customer services.

So what sort of opportunities do organisations have to achieve this? There are a number of key areas just within ICT and the management of projects that generally have the capacity to yield savings through a more structured and controlled approach.

Many organisations lack a coherent ICT strategy, unless your strategy is welded to the broader organisational vision, you will be wasting money on perhaps interesting, but ultimately non strategic ICT activities. A typical ICT department has many internal and external pressures. Without clear direction, staff are likely to be spending a lot of time doing the wrong things at the wrong time in terms of the corporate priorities. This wastes a lot of money!

A robust ICT strategy will provide a clear road map of what needs doing, and ensure that the correct priorities are being addressed at all times to progress the corporate plans.

ICT infrastructure also generally offers significant opportunity to reduce costs and at the same time improve the service to users. ICT systems and infrastructure tend to be implemented on a project by project basis which is an outdated approach and highly inefficient. Modern commodity technology allows for widespread sharing of ICT resources. Modern technology such as ‘virtualisation’ techniques can reduce the size of server estates dramatically. Read the rest of this entry »