In speaking with other CIOs and IT leaders, one topic that often arises involves organizations’ struggles with the idea of IT cost take-out. I share with them ten ways Accenture’s IT was able to achieve a stronger, leaner IT.
1. Run IT like a business – First, create the right environment for IT transformation. Document your strategy and establish strong IT governance. Take a managed services approach to letting the business make decisions.
2. Centralize, standardize, and consolidate – From applications to data centers, less is more. Supporting fewer environments helps drive efficiency, productivity and improve the ability to deliver new capabilities more quickly.
3. Source smarter – Leverage low-cost locations to save money and tap into specialized skills.
4. Rationalize applications – Review what is necessary. We reduced our application base from 2,000 to just over 500. This simplified our environment, enabling lower cost and providing a “single source” of data for the business.
5. Manage by portfolio – This will allow you to identify capabilities that add the most value to the business.
6. Consolidate data centers – save money by reducing the number of centers needed to run your business.
7. Virtualize data centers – This will allow multiple applications and databases to use shared hardware and storage.
8. Transform your network – By enabling a suite of new collaboration technologies while simultaneously redoing our global network, we reduced network costs by approximately 20 percent annually.
9. Reengineer processes – Look for opportunities to simplify business process and rework your network.
10. Consolidate suppliers and contracts – Closely review your contracts, consolidate and save money.
This is just the start of how your organization can cut IT costs while improving your IT operations. Get the full Accenture success story in our credential on the topic or listen to a new podcast where we discuss in more detail some of these ideas.
How are you working to reduce IT cost in your organization?