Beat the Slowdown with Tech

During good times, when business is booming, organizations are in a frenzy to

ensure that nothing gets in the way of their growth. They expect the IT

infrastructure to deliver whatever it takes to support the business on its

upward movement. So generous investments are made in IT to ensure that it can

scale up to support the business, and IT budgets continue increasing. CIOs are

busy implementing new projects, evaluating new technologies, and negotiating new

deals. They seldom have time to worry about the growing IT infrastructure

complexity, causing inefficiencies to continue creeping into the system, and

bloating the IT budgets. And then the tides turn and markets see a slump, making

panic and disorder order of the day. Talks of manpower retrenchment and IT

budget cuts become more prominent than anything else.

For those new to this phenomenon, it sounds like the end of the world, but it

really isn't. Market downturns and upswings are a part of the economic cycle and

continue happening. We just have to know how to deal with them. The good news is

that with every economic downturn, we have newer and better technologies

available to deal with it. So, this time's no different. In fact, organizations

today have access to far more technologies than ever before to combat the

slowdown, and in this story, we'll look at some of them. Plus, we also

interacted with CIOs of leading Indian enterprises to understand what they're

doing to combat the slowdown.

First identify the budget sappers



Before you can start identifying technologies to combat the slowdown, it's
important to identify the budget sappers. You have to analyze which areas

consume most of your IT budget. Broadly speaking, in today's scenario, these can

be divided into the following five areas:

OpEx and CapEx: OpEx is perhaps one of the biggest budget sappers.

OpEx or Operational Expenses are costs incurred to manage the IT infrastructure.

In many cases, these can consume 50% or more of the IT budget. They comprise of

manpower cost, recurring software license fees, and service charges to various

service providers like ISPs, telecom, or managed services providers. Then of

course, there are the regular maintenance costs and other costs like printing,

paper, etc. OpEx costs are the most difficult to cut down because they're more

difficult to predict. If your service provider suddenly increases his monthly

fee, then it has a significant impact on your OpEx.

The other major chunk of an IT budget are the Capital Expenses. These are the

costs for implementing new IT projects or for purchasing new hardware, software,

and services. During an economic slowdown, it's very easy to reduce the CapEx

because their costs are fairly well known. The difficulty lies in reducing your

OpEx because it's divided into so many elements.

Infrastructure Complexity: We just talked about this in our intro, and

yes it's another big budget sapper. As you continue deploying new hardware and

software for new projects, the complexity of your IT infrastructure increases.

Lots of servers, multiple operating systems and databases, runaway storage

capacities, are just a few things that have to be managed. These obviously

affect productivity and increase chances of downtime. So you need solutions to

simplify the infrastructure, possibly by reducing the number of servers,

databases, and Operating Systems and optimizing storage usage.

Power: This may not sound like much, because it's usually not the

CIO's responsibility. However, if you start doing the numbers, you'll realize

that IT consumes a significant part of your organization's electricity. And

sadly enough, there are plenty of places where IT's wasting a lot of power. So

you need technologies to control this wastage. Thankfully, there are plenty of

them, which can lead to considerable savings.

Travel: This doesn't just apply to the IT team, but to the entire

organization. Every company incurs significant travel expenses. Given today's

congested roads and delayed flights, traveling is becoming increasingly

difficult. So there are obviously technologies available to reduce travel.

Manual processes: Despite having so much of IT, there would still be

processes that need to be done manually. Even today, having an self-managing,

self-healing IT infrastructure is still a a distant dream. There are still so

many tasks that an IT manager has to perform manually. The same goes for the

rest of the organization as well, so technologies are required to automate as

many manual processes as possible.

Technologies to handle budget sappers



At a time when IT budgets are being slashed, the most logical thing to do is to
optimize the existing IT infrastructure. This is the time to study your IT

infrastructure and see how to extract the most from it. There are several

technologies available for the job, and we'll devote the rest of this story

talking about them. Before we do that, it's important to understand that cost

savings are not attained by cost cutting alone. In order to achieve some cost

savings, you might actually have to invest in certain technologies. You just

have to be able to evaluate the cost savings vs the upfront payment that you

make.

Use SaaS wherever feasible: Till now, Software as a Service had been

considered mostly for SMBs. However, with the economic downturn, even larger

enterprises could consider using certain types of services to save costs.

Use more digital communication: Instead of picking up the phone

and calling people everytime you want to talk to them, try sending them

emails or bringing them to an online chat session. This can help if the

people you need to interact with are located in multiple geographies. Of

course, at this stage you might also want to evaluate using IMs for voice

communication and weigh the savings against bandwidth consumption.

Encourage working from home: Many MNCs have already introduced

this culture in their organization to save costs. Maybe you should also

evaluate it. Maybe the sales team could be kept out on the field and made to

report in office once a week. Or the marketing department could work out of

home with a good Internet connection.

Bring your own laptop: Some organizations even encourage employees

to bring their own laptops into the organization. This way, they don't have

to purchase additional hardware for them.

Re-negotiate existing SLAs: If you haven't done this till now,

then it's essential to get cracking on it. Just as your organization would

be taking measures to retain its key customers, your vendors would also do

every possible thing to retain you (if you're important enough for them).

So, this is the perfect time to re-negotiate existing contracts and SLAs,

and try to get more for the same amount that you're shelling out to your

vendors.

Use Open Source and free software: This point is always debatable

because there are pros and cons to using either commercial, open source, or free

software. So at the very least, you first need to get a broad idea of the

definition of each. Commercial software, as the name suggests is what you have

to pay for, and you usually purchase licenses for it as per your requirement.

Open Source software, by its definition implies that you have access to the

source code of the application you're deploying. This can help in situations

where you'd like to modify the application as per your requirements. Open Source

is not necessarily free. You will definitely have to pay for its support. If you

use open source software that can be freely downloaded from the Internet, then

you'll end up spending on providing support for it. So, if your existing IT

manpower has never used it before, then you'll need to invest time and money in

training them. Once that's done, you'll end up training the users to use it.

Nevertheless, Open Source and free software can be considered as a good option

during the slowdown to avoid large upfront initial investments.

Outsource your server room: One option that is becoming popular is to

outsource your entire server room infrastructure to a data center, and access

everything remotely over a leased link. You save the cost of real estate for

setting up and provisioning for a server room. You save on the cost of manpower

to manage it. You also save a lot of other direct costs, such as power

consumption for IT equipment, air-conditioning, etc. As data centers are built

for 24x7 operation and very high uptimes, you're unlikely to face a hardware

failure. Hence, if you're a mid-sized or small organization, then you might like

to explore this as an option to cut your costs.

Desktop management: This is one of the biggest operational expenses in

an organization, and also the most troublesome with users screaming blue murder

every time the help desk delays resolving their problem.

What you need to look for is software that can help resolve it. Reduce calls

to the helpdesk by making your service desk more efficient. Ensure that all

employees turn off their PCs when leaving home from work. Not only that, but

also make sure they switch off the main switch where the PC has been plugged in

so that all devices connected to the PC are turned off. Usually, one sees

monitors in sleep mode, or mice with fancy lighting inside them turned on, even

though the PC has been shut down. All of this wastes a lot of electricity and

should always be avoided.

Use CCTV cameras: This comes in handy for more than security. You can

use it to keep a tab of your employees to see who's taking how many breaks,

spending more time than usual on the phone, etc. It leads to productivity

enhancement.