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Helping IT Save Money ... and Jobs?
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."
I know, I know... call him a Troll. Actually, I saved my company upwards of $15,000 a year by not renewing software and support contracts for our Nokia firewalls and instead replacing them with Smoothwall (a Linux firewall). I was even able to install Smoothwall onto the old Nokia IP350 hardware.
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).
When you're looking at this sort of thing, you have to make sure you know the difference between eliminating things that represent sunk cost and eliminating things that are not sunk costs yet. It's the latter that you care about; you only care about the former to the extent that they're firmly attached to the latter.
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.