Making better use of existing IT systems, minimising the associated costs, and exploring the possibilities of cloud-based software and services can all help cash-strapped organisations to become more efficient, productive, and profitable, with minimal amounts of up-font investment, as FSN contributing editor Lesley Meall discovers.
Times are hard, money is tight, cash is king, and clichés abound. But we are all under pressure to do more with less, so individuals, businesses, not-for-profit entities, public sector bodies, and entire countries are looking at their information technology investments with an increasingly critical eye. They are hunting for ways to improve productivity, reduce indirect and direct costs, and increase profit margins, with minimal (or even no) investment. So maximum value must be extracted from existing systems, and enhancements or additions must justify themselves more quickly and a lot more convincingly than they did before the downturn.
Some technologies lend themselves to this more readily than others (on which more, later), but if the results of a Forrester Research survey are anything to go by, many organisations should start their hunt for value by carefully considering their existing IT spending. “Despite all the hype around new technologies that have hit the market in the past few years, firms are devoting most of their IT spending on already-installed technologies,” reported Holger Kisker, a senior analyst with Forrester. According to Forrester’s 2010 surveys of software use in enterprises and small and medium businesses (SMBs), more than half of IT software budgets are spent on ongoing operations and the maintenance of existing applications.
So this is an area where economies could have a big impact, but many companies do not understand what makes up their maintenance costs clearly enough to target them. As well as obvious overheads such as the maintenance fees charged by software vendors, the overall cost of ownership and maintenance is affected by costs relating to systems integration (or a lack of it), help for end-users, failure and non-failure incidents and queries, training (and the lack of it), upgrades and the usability of systems, and more. Fortunately, there are some simple steps that can be taken to minimise the associated costs, without doing a complex cost benefit analysis.
- Check the cost of maintenance contracts with systems vendors – it may be possible to renegotiate better deals, or be less costly to outsource maintenance and support to a third-party specialist.
- Consolidate where possible – an organisation big enough to have multiple IT departments or multiple IT service desks, is big enough to benefit from the rationalisation of the associated staff, processes, software tools and licenses.
- Consider IT cost optimisation – redundant software and hardware drives up costs, so make sure you aren’t paying for too many software licenses, and look at ways of using hardware more efficiently, such as virtualisation.
- Adopt a greener approach to IT – steps that cut carbon emissions and make resource consumption more sustainable can reduce the cost of consumables and utilities, and reporting on it can be good for business.
- Reduce reliance on staff that are the only ones who know how to use certain applications – document the associated procedures and how software is used to perform them, so that bottlenecks do not occur in their absence.
- Make sure that you are exploiting all of the features your existing software applications have to offer – even if this means considering an upgrade to the latest version (it may be worth the additional cost).
- Investigate alternatives to in-house legacy systems – an application that provides a necessary service but no competitive advantage may cost less if a third party provides it on a ‘rental’ basis or as an outsourced service.
A little time spent investigating the features offered by systems you have already bought and paid for can deliver unexpected cost savings and productivity benefits (without even using actual ‘productivity’ tools). Are you still hand printing letters, stuffing envelopes and paying for postage when you could be using email? (Speeding up the purchase to payment cycle can save time and money and reduce your exposure to supplier insolvencies.) Are you are taking full advantage of the reporting facilities offered by your accountancy software? (Perhaps you could be managing cash flow more effectively.) Could you be making better use of your operating system software? (Using features such as Briefcase, in MS Windows, minimises the need for paper files and reduces the potential for duplications and errors.)
Exploit cloud-based options
There is also a great deal to be gained from exploring some of the new ways of working offered by cloud-based software and services. Various analyst firms have found that the flexible delivery and billing model they can offer is currently one of the major drivers behind organisations’ plans to make changes to their existing systems’ set-up. Research from Forrester, for example, indicates that around one-third of enterprises have subscribed or plan to subscribe to Software as a Service (SaaS) applications during 2010 – but this does not mean that one-third of all business transaction volumes will end up running on SaaS offerings, as most uptake is in areas that are not mission-critical.
Taking a ‘toe in the water’ approach to new technology is understandable, and this is happening in areas ranging from collaboration to mashups. Although some of this demands up-front investment in new or existing systems, the ever-increasing smorgasbord of cloud-based services means that costs can much more easily be managed and minimised, and even the smallest organisation will find this putting all sorts of software and systems (and the related productivity and cost control benefits) within their reach – on demand, if, as, and when they can benefit from them. And as FSN has detailed in earlier coverage, these range from tools to enhance planning and improve decision-making (such as cloud-based business intelligence) to tools to save time, streamline processes, and cut costs (such as cloud-based expenses management).
Clearly, systems such as these will not introduce themselves, and the associated ease of access and affordability can easily blind you to the darker side of the cloud (so if you are going to exploit on-demand services, even for non-critical processes be aware of the associated risks and how to mitigate against them). But making the most of some of the collaboration and productivity possibilities created by on demand online systems may sometimes be no more difficult than enabling and encouraging staff to experiment with what’s available out there; take interactive online spreadsheets and wikis.
The traditional ‘on-premise’ spreadsheet lives on your desktop, or the corporate server, and while it can be ideal for quick ‘what if?’ calculations and recording certain types of information, it can leave a lot to be desired when it is used for iterative and collaborative processes, such as budgeting, where more than one person is going to be working on a spreadsheet. Sharing a spreadsheet with multiple other users can be complex, messy and time-consuming: email messages and attachments quickly proliferate, slowing down the process of information sharing and turning version control into a nightmare.
There is specialist software available to manage the process (but it does not come cheap), and some version of Microsoft’s ubiquitous spreadsheet (such as Excel 2010) can be used along with an organisations’ own SharePoint server (if it has one) or SkyDrive (Microsoft’s online storage space) to share spreadsheets more easily. But for the many who use MS Excel because it was bundled with the PC they bought (and therefore feels free), and who don’t want to spend pay Microsoft for the latest offering (or upgrade their hardware to accommodate it), there are other cost effective ways for multiple users to collaborate, share and publish spreadsheets, by accessing SaaS offerings (some free) from a browser.
Work more efficiently online
At BadBlue.com, for example, you will find tools to share and work on Excel spreadsheets online; the “personal” version is free and the “Enterprise Edition” costs. EditGrid.com and Securesheet.com also offer conversion and other facilities, while Google Docs and Zoho.com both provide tools for viewing and working with Excel spreadsheets, and more extensive ranges of on demand tools for collaborating and sharing information online. Google Docs, for example, comes with a handy built-in chat tool on the right-hand side of the screen, so that you can discuss changes with anyone else who is accessing a spreadsheet at the same time as you. So if you don’t already have much invested (emotionally, historically or financially) in the ubiquitous Excel, you may want to investigate what these other proprietary spreadsheets have to offer, and what it will (or will not) cost you to utilise them.
Wikis are another way of using on demand SaaS tools to save time (and money) by collaborating, aggregating and sharing information more efficiently and effectively with colleagues and other (personal and professional) contacts – by creating and editing linked web pages in what the originator of the wiki concept defined as “the simplest online database that could possibly work”. There is almost no administrative effort involved in using a wiki, you don’t need any technical knowledge, and users can shape their own site structure or allow it to develop organically as the wiki evolves. (To see just how simple watch this demo, and don’t be put off by the levity.)
Wikis can be used to collaborate with customers and clients, create and update documentation, build online communities, manage projects, organise events, and share ideas and information, without the need for distribution (via email or hard copy), so they aren’t dependent on a central distribution centre or a linear distribution, and although some of the available systems are aimed at corporates (and charge accordingly), as long as you have a browser and internet access, you can get online access to a selection of wiki development tools and hosting services with minimal (and in some cases no) additional cost.
Some wikis are public efforts that can be updated by anyone, others are private with restricted access; and there are various ways of building and maintaining them. You can start from scratch, using your own server to host your wiki, or run it on a corporate intranet (which is managed in-house or hosted externally), and then build your wiki, or wikis, using the ‘wiki engine’ of your choice. There are hundreds out there, ranging from MediaWiki, which is free (and used by Wikipedia), to TeamPage from Traction, a fully featured enterprise knowledge management platform that’s a popular choice for corporate intranets (and is free until you have more than five users). So with a little imagination, you can become more efficient and productive (and possibly even more profitable) without investing anything more than your time.
