In order to grow profitability, you have to increase revenue or reduce costs. Preferably both. Companies that take the time to thoroughly examine their IT infrastructure service can often find valuable ways to reduce IT expenses. The goal, of course, is to do that while retaining or improving service levels.

Creating a dashboard that shows your key performance indicators, related data and expenses provides a good visual overview and makes it easier to pinpoint gaps and opportunities to streamline, modify or jettison under-performing hardware, software, services or maintenance procedures. Well-reasoned benchmarks enable you to compare performance to overall business goals as well as IT infrastructure service goals.

Look at all aspects of your IT infrastructure, including:

• Mainframe computing.
• Server performance.
• Operations costs.
• Disaster recovery and business continuity planning and procedures.
• Data center management.
• Telecommunications and data networking.

This data, along with evaluating the applications you’re using, will help you develop strategies and specific solutions to reduce IT expenses.

Can you further optimize productivity of personnel, equipment or applications to reduce labor and operations costs? Are there new technologies you could adopt, or are there ways you could selectively or broadly outsource IT infrastructure that would support your overall business goals more effectively without sacrificing service levels? Would any of them enable you to actually increase or augment service levels?

Look at the projected costs and benefits of working within the IT infrastructure service capabilities you now have. Then compare that to potential alternative platforms or services such as:

• Co-location.
• Off-site hosting or managed services.
• Cloud computing.
• Outsourcing of data center or support activities.

Investigating opportunities to reduce IT expenses provides broader benefits.

You’re using technology to enhance business operations but also to gather internal intelligence and analyze data. That additional, detailed information supports stronger strategic planning, helps key personnel make smarter daily operations decisions and can generate more accurate IT needs forecasts. The entire process highlights how IT infrastructure service elements is affecting costs as well as service levels, company-wide.

You’re creating a culture of awareness, and benefits the quest for reduced expenses.

Your assessment will identify whether you can enhance productivity from existing technology infrastructure or replace it with more cost-effective solutions. If legacy systems are aging beyond their ability to deliver top performance cost-effectively, it may be time to transform your IT infrastructure service with a new operations model.

The solutions you choose may help reduce future capital investment as well as ongoing operations costs.

Self-assessment can be difficult for any size company.

It’s time-consuming, and it draws IT and other staff away from core responsibilities. It’s hard to be impartial, and your people may feel their own reputation or self-preservation is at stake. Top executives often turn to external experts to assist with their discovery and assessment process.

A consulting team with comprehensive IT expertise can help assemble the right analytics, evaluate the information and make well-targeted recommendations for moving forward based on the latest relevant IT trends and best practices. That’s valuable because even the most diligent internal IT staff rarely has time to stay abreast of every new development.

Even more importantly, the right consultant can help you evaluate potential IT infrastructure service solutions, including vendors or outsourcing partners. That’s crucial, because transforming your IT management or service delivery processes requires establishing a long-term working relationship. It has to be the right decision. And success depends on choosing the right partner.                                                    

The best solutions will help your company reduce IT infrastructure total cost of ownership, reduce operations costs and maintain or increase service levels.