The economy is slowing down, and in its wake there is a widespread “AXE” phenomenon. Cost reduction can also be influenced by making small and focused investments. Following are some of the areas that could be leveraged to achieve the same:

Cost Rationalization Programs
Cost-Rationalization programs are gathering increased impetus in the recent times. Along with the short-term benefits using rationalization, CIOs must also look at IT process improvement opportunities for long-term benefits. These opportunities are placed by:

• Cost-avoidance practices

• Efficiency-gains

Increased Focus on IT-enabled “Business Process Improvement”
“If you cannot measure it, you cannot improve it”. Hence Business Performance Measurement is a natural pre-cursor to Business Process Improvement.Technologies like Business Process Management, Business Activity Monitoring and Business Intelligence form the basis of business process improvement. Right use of these technologies will make the business processes more robust, agile & transparent.

Enhance your IT Governance

• Project Portfolio Management

It is however pertinent to ensure that appropriate scoring metrics are defined to measure business value of each IT investment that will foster right decision-making.

• Application Portfolio Management

This IT Governance process enables owners to plan, run, monitor & support the IT applications & its related changes. Application portfolio management is a key to build a simplified view of the entire IT applications landscape. This level of visibility will help them to plan and control their budgets effectively.

• IT Service Management

Automating the key IT processes to make them enforceable and repeatable reduces the opportunity for errors and drives greater efficiency of IT operations.Using an integrated lifecycle approach, enterprises can truly optimize their IT services.

Setup the Platform for Transformational Programs
Once the IT Governance process is set, it becomes the platform to monitor and control the entire IT landscape to bring in the improvements. e.g. Once the application portfolio management processes are established, it will help you identify redundant or overlapping functionalities that exist within the IT environment. This information can then be used to run a quick top-down assessment of applications to detect the ones that are not delivering a significant value and leverage application rationalization to generate quick cost-savings to have the homework done and be ready for it in record time.