Helping IT Save Money ... and Jobs? 606
An anonymous reader asks: "I work in a small, overworked and understaffed IT department at a profitable business. We recently got the news that we needed to cut costs. While every penny counts, simply turning off the computers at night and saving pennies on processor cycles isn't exactly a noticeable savings. I'm curious what measures other Slashdot readers have taken to save money within their IT departments."
Every Penny Does Count (Score:4, Insightful)
If you're in a small, overworked and understaffed IT depatment, are you sure there's anything left to be cut besides offshoring? Does it always have to be cutting costs in IT? How about, for once, in other departments?
My company recently merged 3 production servers and 2 test servers into 1P and 1T, and saved 3 SQL2000 licenses (yeah, ex ex ex developers just set up their own "independant self sustain" web+data servers whenever they needed one).
Also, how about cutting the 'net costs/time spent on Slashdot?
Re:Every Penny Does Count (Score:5, Insightful)
Keep overtime to a minimum. Do a cost analysis of overtime paid vs. off-hour staffing and consider the addition of rotating on-call time for your employees.
Keep your hardware CLEAN and read your logs! You can ID many hardware problems well before they cause downtime. Remember, when an office of 100 cant work, every hour of downtime translates to 100 hours of lost productivity.
Change from Cells to Pagers.
Don't let inkjet printers in the office AT ALL. They are a constant headache and steal more in support costs than ink.
Need new workstations? Most software packages will run fine on older (say -- 5 year old) hardware. Buy off-lease Compaq, Dell, Gateway, etc... You can get 5x the hardware for the same money with win2k licences included. It will cost you in setup time -- but if you can manage identical hardware profiles (not that difficult), set up a single machine and clone it.
Re:Every Penny Does Count (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Every Penny Does Count (Score:3, Insightful)
When it was cut, we moved to only forty hour paid work weeks with all overtime comped. People would keep spreadsheets of the overtime the
Re:Every Penny Does Count (Score:4, Insightful)
Pagers are less reliable with worse coverage. And in many cases, a cell phone is simply cheaper. With a cell phone, you are talking with the person (or can be), so you instantly know if they are aware of a problem and when they'll be in a position to fix it.
Having recently repaired a 5 year old computer -- a K6-2/350 running windows 98, there's no damned way you could get any productive work done with that thing. Just browsing the web is horribly slow. God help you if you have to run any real office applications (word, outlook, access, etc.) 2-3 year old (1GHz+ processor speeds) machines might be passable if your company is flat broke, but those machines are costing the company some employee productivity.
Re:Every Penny Does Count (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't know where you live (or what pager company you use), but here (in Western Washington State) pagers have much, much, much better coverage than cells. Not only that, but they keep working even while in parking garages or in the center of large buildings where cellphones almost always lose signal.
Pagers also have much better battery life, lasting 3-4 weeks on a single AA battery. You'll rarely miss a page because the battery is dead-- but a cell battery won't even last a full day.
Not to mention that no doubt the vast majority of your staff already carries around a cell phone. Carrying around a cell and a pager is not that weird, but carrying around two cells would be very strange.
I agree with your other points... overtime watching doesn't help with salaried employees, and 5-year-old computers are older than you think, but pagers are definately a better idea than cell phones.
Re:Every Penny Does Count (Score:4, Funny)
Pagers also have much better battery life, lasting 3-4 weeks on a single AA battery. You'll rarely miss a page because the battery is dead-- but a cell battery won't even last a full day.
Not to mention that no doubt the vast majority of your staff already carries around a cell phone. Carrying around a cell and a pager is not that weird, but carrying around two cells would be very strange.
You mention all of these things like they're faults, but I consider them to be features of cell phones. Sporadic coverage? Bad reception inside buildings? Low battery life? Cell phones offer all of the political capital of being 24/7 reachable while still offering a million excuses for why you never answer or call back.
Re:Every Penny Does Count (Score:4, Interesting)
Okay, then go get a machine off a two year or three year lease. These can run Windows 2000 *gasp* Windows XP if it's your fancy.
By the way, running a business-normal 350MHz machine puts you squarely into Intel land. I loved the K6/2 line, but that was because for the same money I could buy a 550MHz processor when I could only buy the 350MHz or 400MHz Intel P-II. MHz for MHz the Intels were ahead. My employer has 25,000 PCs on the desktops of users and only around fifteen people to do field work on them across a hundred sites in a metro area. We have machines still out there as slow as 75MHz that are officially off the supported list, but we still support machines down to 300MHz. Take that 300MHz Intel P-II and put 512MB RAM in it and it's capable of doing all required tasks in a reasonable time. I know this because our accounting department is still using them because they're the last PCs we bought in desktop form factor cases, and they don't want towers.
What task using say, Microsoft Office 98 can not be done that can be done using Microsoft Office XP? Don't go to marketing literature to answer it, answer it off of the top of your head. Cop-out answers like "file versions are too new for it" don't count either. I want to know what actual features that real people use didn't yet exist in MS Office 98 that people depend on now in Office XP. If you can't think of any then running that computer from 1998 or 1999 with an OS dating back to when the hardware was reasonably new (NT, 98, 2000, hell even Millennium) properly security patched, updated, or secured behind proper firewalling, and a proper replacement web browser could do everything that the user needs as fast or faster than the user needs it.
I'm writing this on my 700MHz Celeron based laptop with 192MB RAM. I surf the web, check my email, write papers with a word processor, play DVDs with no hardware accelerator, work with spreadsheets, and work with a graphics editor. Yes, I have to be a bit careful with that last one, but it does just work to the point that I haven't really considered a need to buy the newest/latest/greatest other than because 192MB RAM is maxing out what this machine can handle.
My work computer was a 400MHz Celeron for a long time and it still let me use the workorder system (written with Access), use a word processor, a spreadsheet program, email, web browsing, and the like. The only reason that I got a better computer was that they offered us upgrades because we had some parts left over after a project.
Apples and oranges. (Score:4, Insightful)
You indicate 25,000 computer with 15 techs.
Quite obviously saving $100 in hardware per PC would save you $1/4 million. Cutting back on 15 cell phones....peanuts. You are likely to be inclined to look for savings in regards to hardware - or per PC. A small computer with 30 computers and 3 staff will have far different needs. Saving $100 per computer would be the same as 2 weeks wages..... Peanuts.
I don't know the answer but I do think that you're situation is far from similar.
Re:Apples and oranges. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Every Penny Does Count (Score:3, Interesting)
<p
Re:Every Penny Does Count (Score:3, Interesting)
I worked for a while at an insurance company doing data entry. You'd be surprised how little they really need (or how much they purchased). The whole affair was done over a telnet terminal to their mainframe. Of course, I was running that terminal o
Re:Every Penny Does Count (Score:3, Informative)
If you don't believe me, look here [tomax7.com].
On another note... I currently use two Pentium II 350MHz systems at work, exclusively. One runs linux, the other runs Win98. I have absolutely no problem being productive on it. It'
Re:Every Penny Does Count (Score:4, Interesting)
I can be added to your list of people who get overtime. Yearly I get paid a little less than average salary for my experience level around here, but since I work 50+ hours a week they stay very competitive. I work at a printing company, and I am one of two people that manage the IT operations of the company as well as do typesetting and health care printing. The other guy is IT by education, and I'm a programmer by education, and between the two of us we can handle pretty much everything they throw at us. Well, except that we're slowly getting behind in our work despite the 10+ hours overtime we put in every week. God help us if this trend continues and we need to find a third person with the credentials to do everything we need.
Back on topic, being on the ground floor of a rapidly expanding company, we have the good fortune of basically have an unlimited IT budget. For example, about 2 months ago (before I was hired) they bought a brand new XServe and RAID array just to be a domain controller and do some file and print sharing. To go off on a tangent, they contracted its setup to some momo who broke it horribly (set
We can pay $1500 for a color laser jet printer and after we got it all hooked up (just a few days ago) all our boss says is "wow that looks great hey don't show anyone this they'll want to come in here and start using it". As far as management and finances goes, it's really the most absurd (and the laxest) place I've ever worked.
(Side note: 'Laxest' is a strange word. I would have assumed 'more lax' if I hadn't just looked it up)
Re:Every Penny Does Count (Score:5, Insightful)
Jaysyn
Re:Every Penny Does Count (Score:5, Informative)
While we're talking about printing, check some of the software to see what's being printed, and how.
Where I worked, the software package by default printed a light grey background along with whatever actual data was being printed. Changing the background to white was a seemingly trivial change, but since the organization prints reams worth of paper every day, the drop in toner use/cost was extremely noticible.
Re:Every Penny Does Count (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Every Penny Does Count (Score:3, Informative)
My company recently merged 3 production servers and 2 test servers
You might also be able to move users onto a thin client setup (like LTSP [ltsp.org].)
Also, consider using free alternatives to licensed products, like OpenOffice.org. (Bleedin' obvious around here, but I haven't seen anybody mention it yet.)
Re:Every Penny Does Count (Score:5, Informative)
Fembots here talks about saving three SQL Server 2000 licenses; well, you don't get to cash those licenses back in or resell them, so that's a rather empty gesture, although he/she'll avoid any renewals that might be associated with the three licenses.
Some costs are per-user: desktop operating system licenses, desktop app software licenses, desktop machines, MS client access licenses. If your company has expansion plans, get rid of those costs by using Linux, Firefox, OpenOffice, etc. and inexpensive beige-box semi-disposable PCs instead of paying so much just for the letters D, E, L, and L. If you're real good at setting up application servers under Linux, you can use junkers (down to P/90) as desktop systems and your users won't know the difference. If this is a company in trouble and being able to scale up operations is one way the biz managers could solve the problem, DON'T sabotage the effort by adding on so much of your own expansion costs.
If you needed DBMS software, you were being irresponsible with your company's money if you didn't evaluate PostgreSQL to see if it would do what you needed and went with MS SQL Server or Oracle just on the basis of the name.
If I were your IT manager, I'd already be doing these things, but I'm not, so what I think you should do is listen carefully to any discusions about how the line-of-business managers might want to fix things and do your damndest to help them succeed.
Consolidating Servers (Score:3, Informative)
The Numbers Fallacy. (Score:5, Interesting)
A lot of companies are on a permanent cost-cutting binge simply because it helps upper management look good with investors. Now, it's often true that these policies get started when a company's wasting money. But they will often continue long after the waste has been dealt with, or even when there was no provable waste to begin with. It's just another example of how corporate policy is set by numbers dweebs, you justify their jobs by the fallacy that every reduction in cost is an increase in profits. It does work because (a) you do have to spend money to make money and (b) as often as not, the apparent cost reduction exists only because of some accounting silliness.
A couple years ago, I had a workstation on my desk that wasn't quite up to what I was asking it to do. A lot of my time (and thus the company's money) was being wasted while I waited for the system to stop thrashing. The standard solution is to request a new workstation. But I thought that was just a little too much to spend. (I'd like to say I wanted to help control costs. But the truth is that I'm fundamentally a tightwad, even when it's not my money being spent.) Instead, I decided to request a RAM and disk drive upgrade which I calculated would make the system much more usable. Here's how it went:
- I put in a request for the purchase. It's only about $300, but as a cost control measure, even $300 purchases have to approved at the VP level. I wait.
- Weeks pass. I threaten to buy the hardware with my own money. For some reason, this threat, though often employed, is usually effective, and I'm told that approval is emmient.
- The purchase is approved. But then my boss tells me that I'm in violation of a new cost control measure, because my workstation has been amortized and now makes the numbers look bad, because of IT costs. I agree to withdraw my previous request and put in a request for a new workstation.
- Weeks pass. A date is set for the replacement of my workstation. But then upper management decides it doesn't like our numbers (we're solidly in the black, but costs are too high. So they impose a spending freeze. No workstation, no RAM upgrade.
- Weeks pass. Freeze continues.
- This goes only for something like six months. Finally, another issue causes me to leave the company.
Is the company making every penny count? No, they're actually wasting money by working inefficiently. They wasted a lot of my time, then tried to buy a workstation I didn't need. But the numbers look good.Re:The Numbers Fallacy. (Score:5, Informative)
At a previous job, the IT budget was on a permanent freeze. In the three years I was with the company, we had only made one major investment in IT, and that was at the beginning of my tenure. Now, we were an Application Service Provider, so our lifeblood was in our servers and how fast we could crunch numbers.
Did I mention that the major investment in servers, all the servers were bought off of eBay and other second-hand vendors?
So I'm dealing with four year old servers, with outdated hardware this is just slowing down more and more, while we are getting more and more customers, and larger customers. I tried explaining to the Powers that there is a fixed number of cpu-hours, and it takes X hours to process customer Y on our current hardware. We were operating at something in excess of 90% capacity. I gave several pleas to free up some money to acquire some faster, more robust servers, thereby reducing X, allowing us to handle more Y.
But as IT is commonly held as a cost center, I got the usual "we don't have the money". I left the company eventually, but heard they hit a hard brick wall as the production environment was saturated almost 24 hours a day- the couldn't bring in any more customers. Sort of ironic that a company can get killed by its own success.
Re:The Numbers Fallacy. (Score:4, Interesting)
I gave several pleas to free up some money to acquire some faster, more robust servers, thereby reducing X, allowing us to handle more Y.
But as IT is commonly held as a cost center, I got the usual "we don't have the money".
What the hell were they doing with all the revenue from those customers? Seriously, did you ask them? In those words? IT is not a cost center when your core product is IT.
Re:The Numbers Fallacy. (Score:3, Informative)
Meanwhile, the IT processing power remained at a constant while IT staffing actually was cut. Interesting times...
Numbers are your friends (Score:3, Interesting)
Classic oops: if IT serves transactions for sales, it's "part" of sales, a profit center.
As a capacity planner, I usually talk to the business managers and say things like
Re:Every Penny Does Count (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Every Penny Does Count (Score:3, Insightful)
A good idea.. (Score:2, Funny)
easy (Score:2)
Sorry, was that too close to home?
Where do you spend it? (Score:5, Insightful)
mostly centralization (Score:2)
Re:mostly centralization (Score:3, Informative)
Fire mid-level managers who don't do anything... (Score:2, Insightful)
start saying "No" (Score:2, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I got a better idea (Score:5, Insightful)
"Here are the projects I want you to work on."
"But these projects are commercially available for less money than our development costs to make them."
"I don't care, I made promises to other departments that we will do them."
"But it will take a staff of 200 to do these projects in 3 months. We only have 30. We will need more time."
"We don't have the budget for that, so everyone will be forced to work 80 hours a week with no overtime pay."
"In some cases we already have some of these software projects. Like Microsoft Outlook for scheduling and contact management, and Microsoft Project for Project Management."
"I want custom versions of those programs, because I promised them to the other departments."
"Well at least can we have a raise to compensate for all the overtime we will put into these projects?"
"No, in fact, I have to cut everyone's salary in order to help budget more money for marketing and executive pay raises."
Then the IT department has a 90% turnover rate for four years of this, and each IT employee that is fired or leaves ends up costing 150% of the annual salary for that position to replace, which adds more to the IT budget.
Then after being over-stressed, over-worked, and suriving 4 and a half years of this, I get really sick and end up being fired and replaced with someone willing to work for half of my salary.
Re:I got a better idea (Score:3, Funny)
Easy! (Score:2)
Re:Easy! (Score:2)
Brilliant, have a Guiness!
Cut Users (Score:3, Funny)
if it weren't for those pesky users...
Quit posting on slashdot on company time? (Score:2)
turning off computers? (Score:5, Insightful)
Instead, do what businesses themselves do. diversify! If your IT department is only responsible for maintaining a users desktop, then develop an interactive web based help system that goes towards that purpose. Now your it department also has programmers, and your mission is expanded (and hopefully your budget will follow!)
Easy (Score:3, Funny)
Oh there might be some outages at the company during that week. I expect that any necessary employees could be convinced to contract their services to whatever department needs them... at about 3 times their average salary...
Re:Easy (Score:2, Funny)
Turning off the computer is costly (Score:2)
Re:Turning off the computer is costly (Score:5, Insightful)
A computer, at night even
Wrong assumption (Score:3, Interesting)
Your assumptions are incorrect.
For the 100,000 machine office they are not pay per kilowatt-hour like you are. They pay peak-demand, meaning that they pay for however much power they use at the highest moment, as if that was how much they used all day (sometimes even month!). Power at night is free because they pay for it anyway. They agree to this because if you do any management of use at all you can save a lot of money this way.
Places that heat with electric see no change at all because either wa
Re:Turning off the computer is costly (Score:3, Insightful)
Your claim is based on the assumption that employees will just sit there and do nothing for the 5 minutes they wait for their computer to start up.
Odds are they'll waste the same amount of time per day doing nothing product whether or not they have to wait for their computer to start up. There are probably many other things they could do while waiting.
Are you building instead of buying? (Score:5, Insightful)
Sometimes it's the opposite. (Score:3, Insightful)
As an IT/IS manager, I have in the past been tasked with buying software packages for major company initiatives... and found that all of the decent packages that came anywhere near meeting requirements
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Sometimes it's the opposite. (Score:3, Funny)
Dump Microsoft (Score:3, Insightful)
You might also consider dumping IIS for Apache if possible.
And yes, you should shut down all your PC's, as it will save money. It adds up.
Re:Dump Microsoft (Score:2, Interesting)
Many moons ago before I saw the light and abandoned Microsoft products as a way of life, I spent an average of 15-20% of my time recovering 0wned Windows systems. Sometimes it required a complete reinstall because the system was so screwed up. I feel for anyone stuck doing that. Not to mention how boring after the Nth time it happens.
I understand that same company now runs UNIX/Linux systems and has even started testing various Linux Desktop
Re:Dump Microsoft (Score:3, Insightful)
I work (part-time) at a human resources department and Excel is used all over the place. If it were replaced with Calc, then we'd have
Re:Dump Microsoft (Score:3, Insightful)
Same thing I do when I can't open something from an uber important client using MS Office (this happens too): point him to Adobe's "make a pdf" website.
Then again, our uber-important clients don't know jack about technology and don't mind hearing stuff like that (the last Word document that wouldn't open, for instance, was messed up because the VP writing the report tried to embed some we
My suggestion: (Score:2)
Life Cycle (Score:3, Interesting)
First, we had our staff reduced and outsourced to contractors.
Second, we optimized our equipment to take up less space, electricity, and heating cost.
Third, we merged our licenses and maintenance to enterprise contracts.
Fourth, we went open-source and cut off certain high-priced vendors.
Fifth, our help-desk became voicemail, auto-respond, and Indian.
Now we're laying off the contractors and bringing the IT work all in-house again.
Why do I think that someday a pile of transistors will be doing my job?
Linux & OpenSource (Score:5, Informative)
I also avoided upgrade costs to XP for about 10 of our 50 systems. This last year, we upgraded all from Win2K to XP. However, 10 of the systems were only used by temps, contractors, and consultants and only for web browsing, webmail, etc. So we installed FC3 on them saved the almost $200 each on XP upgrade licenses.
Oh, and I save the whole company countless amounts of money when I installed Firefox and set it as the default browser. Pop-ups went away, re-installs resulting from spyware went away, etc. It saved my time (not having to do re-installs and system restores) and end-user times (not having their system unusable while I fixed them).
Re:Linux & OpenSource (Score:5, Interesting)
re: service contracts (Score:3, Informative)
I used to work in I.T. for a place that was constantly complaining about a need to "cut costs" (and in an overall sense, they did - because several of their locations were being shut down as unprofitable, etc.). Unfortunately, we had such things as support contracts with Oracle for our main database that cost upwards of $30,000/yr. to renew -
IT is a support organization (Score:4, Insightful)
With that said, why don't you look at becoming someone who provides your business complete solutions to their problems as opposed to just keeping Server X up or Program Y debugged. Each of those things can be done by someone else for cheaper. But knowing what your company does, and how to unify business processes and computerize them is not something they can get anybody to do.
So focus on what your company does, and learn their business, and learn how computers will solve their problems. That way you might end up overseeing the group of developers over in India. Learn how to architect a solution, learn how to manage a project. These are the skills that IT needs these days.
Ted Tschopp
bandwidth contracts (Score:2, Informative)
Sorry about the dumbasses ... (Score:2)
Haha (Score:2)
Software Licenses (Score:2, Insightful)
Simple, really... (Score:2, Insightful)
If you want to save the company money, then quit!
Dude, the writing is on the walls as plain as day: ...profitable company...wants to cut costs...
Some bean counter is trying to squeeze as much efficiency out of you folks as possible. If I had to guess, the company is going up for sale soon and they need to make the place look as good as possible for the sale.
2nd job! (Score:3, Funny)
*shrug* it's a no worse idea than cutting support costs when support is already overworked. Perhaps such a message [perhaps in more businesslike terms] should be the proper reply.
Who do you want to feel it? (Score:3, Informative)
Depending on your political clout, it sounds like it might be time to start cutting services (evening/weekend tech support, high-speed internet, etc).
blackmail employees (Score:4, Funny)
If you find out anyone's surfing for donkey porn - tell them it's time to pay up - or their boss will find out.
The money goes back into IT dept. funding so you can still buy that new videocard you need to play Half-Life 2.
Obligatory Bruce Willis quote... (Score:2)
I work in a small, overworked and understaffed IT department at a profitable business.
Well, it may not be popular but..... (Score:2, Informative)
I fired three of the four IT people, kept the person who knew *NIX and could actually work with my other employees, replaced Wintel machines with Macs running OS X and saved myself almost $350k in the first year and $400k the following year.
Difference went back into the business in terms of reinvestment and profit sharing.
Read BOFH (Score:2, Informative)
It is available at theregister.com
Automation (Score:5, Interesting)
I introduced a new way of thinking in my company. Let's automate more. We don't need grunt programmer's writing easily templatable code. We need smarter senior programmers writing templates.
We don't need to have senior management people writing emails every day reminding us to fill in our timesheets on time. We need one script to send out the alert. And we don't need manually maintained spreadsheet tracking hours and contract rates. It's error-prone, time consuming, and can be better performed by a database.
Anything I see people doing repetitively, I look to automate. After all, isn't a computer nothing but an automaton doing the same thing over and over again?
I've found Python to be perfect for automating a lot of my more mundane tasks. I keep looking for that higher level of abstraction.
The problem is the GUI (*cough cough* Windows *cough cough*) where people can't seem to get around clicking. They can't seem to understand that anything they click on can be written in a script instead.
Hey, but that's just me. If I were a business owner, I'd look to get significantly more from my employees by hiring a really smart guy to automate more work.
If someone automates himself out of a job, you bet your ass I'd find him 10 more jobs to automate himself out of. That guy is worth his weight in gold.
Re:Automation (Score:5, Insightful)
Ted Tschopp
Re:Automation (Score:4, Interesting)
It's a good idea, but it's easily snuffed out. Where I work it's really obscene the ammount of redundant, tasks which could be automated... My first and primary block is always management - and they seem to enjoy inventing more work for everyone. Also the users often need to be on board. Right now I'm fighting tooth and nail to get important user feedback, and they just don't care. I think it's important to get user feed back to make sure that you are really automating something and making work easier, not just making the same ammount of work in a different way. When you might as well be talking to a brick wall, progress isn't made.
Last but not least, it takes time and he stated that they were understaffed/overworked. It takes planning and time. I'm getting the feeling that managment there would SAY "automation is good" but then not give you the resources to follow through. Typical I guess. They say they want to cut costs, but will probably just cut jobs no matter what anyway.
Re:Automation (Score:3, Insightful)
The only way to save money in IT is to fire people. To fire people, you have to automate their jobs.
That's it!
If you want to be really good, go to the next step and try & figure out how to help your company make money. Maybe you can do a quick & dirty data mine on the current databases, so your purchasing can order stuff in bulk instead of having lots of small purchases.
Maybe it's looking at trends, and discovering efficiencies in the business.
Where are your costs? (Score:3, Insightful)
If you're spending lots on software upgrades, see if you can hold off on a cycle.
If you're spending lots on bandwidth, shop for a new provider that may get you a better rate.
If you're spending a bunch on outside consultants, put together some numbers showing how much cheaper it would be to do that work yourself.
Maybe you've got excess server horsepower and could get more use out of what you have by switching to thin clients (and get off the PC upgrade treadmill). Maybe your management will be more receptive to Free solutions now that money's tight. Maybe I'm rambling on without enough information to go on.
Without knowing where the bulk of your costs are, it's damned-near impossible to give you any decent advice on cost-cutting.
consolidate servers (Score:3, Interesting)
Another suggestion is run the right tool for the job. Not every database requires Oracle. my company runs on MS SQL server and we are looking at Oracle in the future as we grow. If SQL is too much look at MySQL or some other lower end database.
Don't upgrade unless you need to. We run Windows 2000 and we are looking at 2003 only because we are merging with another company at the moment.
Control resources. I always have people yelling for more mailbox space and file storage space. Tell them to have their department buy it and they STFU.
Do some legwork. Projects and needs come up and it usually means a new server is bought. After a while there is a clusterfcuk of servers running different things. take time out and consolidate servers.
We saved a bunch of money (Score:2, Funny)
Force users to take ownership (Score:2)
unathenticed file storage why pay for MS licenses? Get it over to something free. Look at where your costs are going and cut them.
Shrink your way to success? (Score:2)
I'd think about (and document) how you can add value, not just cut costs.
Halon (Score:2)
save a bundle on payroll.
Look at Telecom (Score:3, Interesting)
You're probably no longer in a contract with one vendor anymore, and you often have choice for local service, or even VOIP providers. Ask accounting to cough up the phone bills (hey telecom is an information service, therefore its IT's responsibility)
It is not uncommon to find that a company with 50 employees is paying $2-3000 a month for long distance, internet and local phone service. Often there are a few old "modem" lines no one is using.. too much voice T1 capacity. Whatever.
These days you can get great deals with non-incumbant carriers, epecially in the combined data/telephone market. $400/month for a T1 with shared voice and data is not uncommon. (whatever T1 bandwidth is not used on voice is allocated over to data) A T1 for data or voice only often runs $700-$1000/month. Saving a few hundred bucks per month gets multipled by 12 for thousands per year in savings. There is nothing like saying you just saved the company the cost of your salary.
Application servers (Score:3, Interesting)
Flexibility would be opened up by allowing people to work from home via the remote clients. If you went with Linux (or a few others with similar capibilities), the desktops could be diskless, further reducing desktop management. Virus/adware/spyware management would almost cease to be an issue.
It's a management mantra... (Score:5, Insightful)
Management needs to take a stock of how the cash is flowing and make strategic decisions on how best to save for long-term growth. Buying that shiny and new equipment may not make much sense, until you realize that you are throwing away five times as much money in manhours every year by not biting the bullet and upgrading.
I used to work for a manufacturing facility, and there are a lot of old-timers who think that saving money involves turning off their PCs every night. But they were not looking at how much time they are wasting every day in dealing with old OSs and crash-prone programs. They also did not look at how much time I (the network engineer) had to go over and "fix" their machines by rebooting for them.
Having your corporate culture mumbling to itself "gotta save money, gotta save money" is a good sign that the senior management, together with middle management, has not done its job in formulating and communicating a coherent game plan to the rest of the company.
Let the experts do it (Score:4, Insightful)
Now we have 4 servers running internally, and one running offsite. We pay a hosting company to manage our mail and web services, which costs us 1/4 of what we paid our own staff to do. We've dropped our fiber and use business DSL, which is another large savings. We also order all of our equipment from a very capable local shop, who take care of building and configuring hardware for us. As a bonus, or local retailer serves as our expert on hardware choices.
A side-benifit of reducing the number of servers we use, we have a surplus of spare parts. These changes also allow IT staff to be redistributed in the company, doing more important things (like testing, customer support, development). While we still order new parts, we've been able to drop our hardware budget by more than half for the past year.
Resources are better spent on things related to your products and services, so it's important to spend your people on those things as well
Reduce Total Cost of Ownership, Document All Work (Score:5, Interesting)
So, this means you need to do two things:
1) Reduce the amount of time you spend on maintenance.
2) Document everything you do.
So, let's look at these a little more closely.
Reducing time spent on maintenance
Examine your obvious unnecessary expenses and see how you can eliminate them.
Having problems with viruses and spyware, or spending time on antivirus and anti-spyware software? Replace IE with Firefox and replace Outlook with... well, anything you like, really. That'll prevent a lot of viruses right away, and that's an enormous savings. It cost my organization $45,000 in staff time every single time a new Windows virus hit the net, and that's AFTER installation of antivirus software. The antivirus software never seemed able to keep up. Also, start replacing simple desktop stations with Mac Minis. MacOS X doesn't get viruses or spyware. I'm not saying you should take perfectly good stations out of service to replace them, but as you replace older systems with new ones, start putting macs in instead of new Windows boxes.
Macs also tend to stay current several years longer than Windows boxes. So, you could amortize the purchase cost over an extra year, or perhaps even two, and save money on desktop machines that way.
Wasting time setting up software on desktops, or maintaining the software on desktops that were already rolled out? Get a Ghost server so you can just ghost the machines. If someone's software is malfunctioning, don't go muck with their system in person, just ghost their system remotely and move on to the next task.
Lots of your time sucked up by idiot users on repetitive problems? Spend a little time writing a how-to white paper, and when they call to ask that same old question, get the person doing triage on incoming support calls to just give them the white paper so they don't have to bother a tech. The faster you get that person off the phone or out the door, the less dollar value your employer spent on your time dealing with them.
Spending time administrating servers? Reduce the number of servers. A smaller number of larger (expensive) servers, well backed-up and with substantial redundancy, is much cheaper to maintain than a large number of smaller (cheap) servers, because you only have to do each maintenance task once for one large server instead of umpteen times for umpteen little servers. I've actually seen organizations that literally had more servers than employees, and they couldn't figure out why they were spending so much on IT. Yeesh!
Problems with viruses and security on servers? Servers going down from time to time? Replace your Windows servers with Apple XServes. They're fast and easy to configure, can integrate into your existing LDAP login environment, can support both Windows and Macintosh clients (your users never have to know), and can easily be set up for RAID and redundancy. Apple also has superb offerings for on-site maintenance agreements.
Documenting all work
Employers often think they can get away with making you cut a person in IT because they don't understand what IT does, so in their mind IT doesn't actually do anything. You need to show them how much you really do. This means very anal-retentively documenting EVERY action of EVERY staff member, and indexing it to the customer as well.
I mean, if the phone rings, there should be a record in the computer of who called and who they talked to and for how long and about what. Got a stupid user who requires constant hand-holding? S
Frame the problem better (Score:3, Insightful)
Are all divisions being pressured to cut or just IT?
You say that IT is overworked but is the IT operation efficient?
How central is IT to the companies business?
How aware is senior management of the contributions of IT?
How does your company compare to others in your industry? For example you may be profitable but if you make your investors $.01 per dollar invested and your industry average is $.10 then your company probably has a problem. Also, how does it compare in use of and expenditures for IT?
Are there indications that the company is facing problems that will require belt-tightening?
How is IT's performance perceived throughout the company?
Is IT's capability being underutilized by the enterprise?
How resistant is the organization to change?
I could come up with more but you get the idea. With some digging you will soon be able to determine what is _really_ happening.
If someone in power is targeting IT only and setting you up to fail they are probably just setting the stage to outsource. Polish up your resume.
If you find that the company is doing fine then this could be a scare-tactic method to lower or eliminate bonuses and raises. Your call whether or not you want to stay.
If IT has a reputation as a bunch of BOFHs then you have been digging your grave for a long time. If you survive in the short term, this needs to be fixed. Sure, some users can be a pain but users are the reason IT exists at all.
If changes can make IT more efficient, suggest them. Just be careful not to confuse efficient with effective. Doing an unnecessary thing efficiently is not helpful. You may even find that its time to wean remaining users from costly legacy systems.
Think like a businessman. Have you renegotiated with your suppliers? Phone time, bandwith, hosting, loop and similar charges have plumetted over the past few years. Are you paying yesterday's prices or staying with an overpriced vendor?
All the time be sure to remember to judge savings against profit, not revenue. I just dropped our DS3 loop charges by $12,000/year. That's not even a quarter-percent of the revenue of a $5,000,000 business but if the profit of that business is $50,000 then that saving just increased profit by 24%! A lot of businesses are just barely in the black if they are profitable at all. And that loop-charge saving is just 1/10 of what I saved by switching vendors a couple years ago. Costs count.
At the same time don't get boxed into "IT is just an expense". Years ago I read a story about senior managers at an auto company all discussing the painful reality of sagging sales and they started spending a lot of time trying to decide just which factories should be closed when one of the managers said, "I have an idea that will save us _lots_ of money. Let's close _all_ the factories." He got a laugh but most importantly he broke the tension and refocused the meeting.
easy (Score:3, Funny)
you want a diagnosis without giving symptoms (Score:5, Informative)
Computers are expensive and unstable, ... (Score:3, Funny)
downtime projects... (Score:3, Interesting)
Cutting IT costs (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Outsourced Ourselves (Score:5, Funny)
Where do I outsource to then????
Re:Outsourced Ourselves (Score:3)
Re:Outsourced Ourselves (Score:2)
Re:Outsourced Ourselves (Score:5, Informative)
http://tinyurl.com/47c8e/ [tinyurl.com]
read up here
Canada: Safe, secure and 'near-shore'
It's about as close as you can get, and its low risk and relatively low prices make Canada a favorite destination for "near-shore" outsourcing.
The Philippines: Low cost, but higher risk
The second most popular outsourcing destination after India, the Philippines has a highly skilled, English-proficient workforce and low cost.
Mexico: It's Close; It's Cheap
Just a short plane ride from the U.S., Mexico boasts a well-educated workforce and lower prices. But the lure of jobs in the U.S. keeps turnover at outsourcers high.
Ireland: Comfort and Convenience at a Higher Cost
Its government is eager to offer tax benefits and grants to companies willing to bring IT work here, making Ireland an increasingly popular destination for software maintenance and development work.
China: Low-level work at lower-than-average cost
Low cost is driving some users to outsource IT work to China, where low-level programming resources can be found at bargain rates.
Singapore: Small but powerful
This small Asian locality has economic stability and a highly trained workforce on its side. But those strengths come at a price.
Vietnam: Nascent capabilities but low cost
A "country in progress," Vietnam offers low labor costs but faces some communications and modernization challenges.
Malaysia
An emerging outsourcing player, Malaysia has invested heavily in a high-tech corridor to lure international business. But a sluggish economy and small workforce have slowed the country's momentum.
Brazil
Brazil is well known for the bossa nova, string bikinis and Amazon forests. Less well known is that, by many measures, it?s one of the world?s major countries. It ranks fifth in both geographic size and population (180 million people) and has the world?s eighth-largest economy.
Russia and Eastern Europe
Its IT workforce is low-cost and highly trained, but Russia's abundant scientific talent remains largely untapped because of government bureacracy and image problems.
Selecting the Right Offshore Vehicle
Opinion: Columnist Bart Perkins says there are different types of offshore outsourcing vendors, and it's wise to pick the type that fits your company culture, requirements and risk profile.
Re:Sell Blood (Score:3, Interesting)
My company recently became a hosting company as a sideline.
They built this fantastic server room, with climate control, tons of backup power and all the bells and whistles, and found that they could host servers and charge for it.
Think of ways to re-sell your existing infrastructure or other overcapacity.
Re:Terminal Server (Score:3, Insightful)
Calling it a Linux Terminal Server is really just a way to explain the idea to people that only have experience with Microsoft products.
So really, every linux machine can be a "Linux Terminal Server" and every linux machine can be a "Linux Terminal Client". There are a multitude of ways of setting up servers and clients, LTSP is one, Nomachines NX is another, and there are many other methods to manage i