8 Strategies to Reduce IT Costs

The pressure is mounting to reduce the IT cost of your establishment. And it seems like an impossible task to achieve. The cost reduction targets are necessary to drive organizational goals and objectives. Are there strategies you can readily incorporate to reduce costs without harming the IT department? This piece explores the ways to achieve this seemingly impossible goal.

1. Reduce the Number of Projects

Completing many projects burden the financial cost of the IT department. You may want to hire more staff or pay overtime to suffice for the extra hours. The simple way to reduce your cost is by cutting back on projects, which invariably reduces the need to employ more hands.
But you must tread on the path of caution, so you don’t discard projects with innovative undertones. Such projects could transform the life of a business. Put on hold projects like upgrading internal technologies.

2. Reducing Personnel Costs

The fact here is that employee wages take a large chunk of your IT budget, and controlling personnel costs can be such a daunting task to achieve. The best option is to turn to contract staffing, so you can have enough staff to cover a busy period. This group of people will be able to handle new projects and can be let go after completing such a task.

3. Embracing Cloud-Based Softwares

Many online tools have automated tons of small and medium business functions — accounting, website hosting, marketing communications, payroll, customer support and more. Besides savings, you can reduce your costs even further if you search deep enough and find a free version of nearly every software that your business uses daily. You can also get in touch with their sales team and ask for a special plan. There’s nothing wrong about it. Software like Apptivo offer all services – CRM, Invoicing, Project Management, Email campaigns and more in one single tool. The best part, they even have a free plan.

4. Consolidating Systems to Reduce Cost

You consolidate when you merge multiple processes into a single unit. By so doing, companies save money, space, and time. It requires a lot of work to consolidate several pieces of information technology solutions into a single, unique platform. But it is worthwhile because your business will run smoother.

5. Standardize IT infrastructure

Standardization is a simple way to ensure consistency across different software and hardware applications. It improves business processes by maintaining compatibility. It plays a significant role in IT cost optimization. Standardization could be as simple as providing employees with the same type of computers or operating system — nobody questions what works best on which platform as everybody is on the same page.

Imagine a situation where a specialist spends so much time mastering each different computer program. It will take a great deal of energy to learn a new platform. More so, all other employees will become familiar with the same platforms and will have an easier time to resolve issues.

6. Provide an IT Self-service for End-users

It might interest you to know that most people who seek help at the IT service desk, don’t need the assistance of a professional. Using an IT self-service, so many people could help themselves. That way, there will be no need for level 1 support, which reduces cost.

You can provide a means for people to find answers to their problems. Take, for instance; setting up an internal-service portal so employees can visit and help themselves. The portal may be used to reset their passwords, rather than ask for help from the IT team. It will reduce labor cost significantly.

7. Renegotiating Contracts with Suppliers

Negotiating business deals could prove to be profitable in the long term. When renewing a contract, you don’t have to agree to the same price you’ve agreed before. You can renegotiate for a lower price. For this to happen, better relationship and rapport with the supplier could prove to be useful. Your suppliers should be willing to give better pricing in exchange for an incentive or contract extension. Try to be flexible during negotiations so they might want to shift grounds. That will be a fair deal.

8. Bring on board Cheaper Suppliers

If you can’t get a better deal from your suppliers, their competitors may be able to shift ground. Before the end of the contract, request for formal bid from competitors, compare them and conclude the supplier that will offer value for money.

Using this strategy, you’ll be able to avail several cost reduction opportunities. The efficiencies in different places will significantly reduce your information technology cost.

Cheers,
Prithvi