Slashdot Mirror
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."
Yes it does. And it's even more important that at time of cost-cutting, you show the initiatives to help the company cutting costs whenever, wherever and however you can - So that your head is not on the chopping board.
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?
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
Saving money is directly tied to where you spend it.
"That's the sort of blinkered, philistine pig ignorance I've come to expect from you non-creative garbage."-Monty Python
There's bound to be 3 or 4 of them.
Loading...
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!)
Bit of an open question really. But are you doing any software development? Sometimes the big drain on the department's budget turns out to be some piece of ambitious development that would be better handled by buying outside.
[x] auto-moderate all posts by this user as 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.
And as a support organization, you need to position yourselves as such. There is a certain sense that you are like the electricity or the water. Now granted if you are not in the Business of IT, perhaps the company will look at focusing on their core business and out sourcing IT. Kinda like how most businesses don't generate their own elecricity or purify their own water.
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
Fantasy remains a human right; we make in our measure and in our derivative mode... -- JRR Tolkien
Sorry to state the bleeding obvious but if you can find an open-source software alternative that is as good as or better than the software packages your currently using then why not propose to migrate across?
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.
Ron Gage - Westland, MI
China.
If you're spending lots on new hardware, see if you can wring more life out of the old stuff.
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.
Except that your assumption is faulty.
/w the monitor "on" will probably draw about 100W of power tops. This assumes the monitor is energy star compliant and goes into a typical sleep state and that your PC isn't running some CPU intensive task, so at the very least cut your numbers to 20% and you get $400/month for the 100 machine scenario. This isn't nothing, but you're better off convincing people not to take clients to expensive dinners.
A computer, at night even
Unfortunatly if the IT deaprtment starts daying NO, it will also start saying NO to things that are really needed.
What you need to do is to get a GOOD insight into what different departments need and spen your time on that. If then the sales department comes along and asks for something extra, just tell them they can choose what of THEIR other projects should be put on hold.
Also charge the departmenst as if you are your own company. Want a new PC mr. big shot? No problem. Give us the money and you get what you want.
That way the other departments will only ask what they really need as it comes out of their budget.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
downsize the IT managers who cannot say "No", as they are the ones that force IT departments to overwork themselves.
"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.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
We were in a similar bind three years ago (and two years ago, and last year too now that I think about it....). One of the things we did was replace Bea Weblogic instances on our 40+ production machines with JBoss. It saved the company about $2M in licences. When one the programmers in my group complained of the slowness (We needed to tweak our configuration) I just pointed out that saving the $2M was the same as 30 of us not getting axed. But the morale of the story is that if you are serious about saving money look how much you are paying for software licences yearly and see if there are viable open source alternatives to the big dollar items.
It's the management's responsibility - not the IT staff's responsibility - to make sure the company comes out in the black on the balance sheet every year. The average IT staffer doesn't see every penny coming in and going out - that job belongs to the CFO and the accounting department.
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.
I've saif this for years, IT should always be looking to put themselves out of a job. (Which interestingly enough is why I'm not concerned with the current fad of outsourcing.) There is always more things to bring under the control of IT automation.
Ted Tschopp
Fantasy remains a human right; we make in our measure and in our derivative mode... -- JRR Tolkien
Sometimes buying software from outside is more expensive than just building it in-house, particularly if the outside software is overpriced (as it usually is), and if you can define a reasonable and limited set of features or the software to be developed in-house (this is where most development efforts fail).
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 cost upwards of $75,000, and at that they wouldn't integrate into any existing systems. (This creates another set of logins to maintain.)
For 2/3 that price, I could hire a competent programmer for a year. So, faced with this dilemma and an expensive package I needed to have, I hired a programmer. And the system was developed in two man months, leaving me able to use that programmer's time on other important projects. Oh, and the package integrated perfectly with existing systems, and was expandable.
Okay, so having a full time programmer is $50,000 a year on the books every year, an ongoing expense, while buying the software is $75,000 and then it's over. (Except for the invisible ongoing administrative costs.) But, I saved $25,000 outright by hiring the programmer, and then if I consider that it actually only took two months of time to do it, I actually saved $66,667 by hiring someone. And then I could save more on the next project that I developed in-house.
Now, if you don't pay the employees while they wait for their machines to boot...
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.
What?
In our small office, we have cut costs by factoring out un-needed servers. When I started there a year ago, there were 30+ servers running in a cooled server room. They had a OC3, and were hosting their own mail, web, dns, etc.
... and not on IT. IT, in many ways, is like plumbing or electrical: the business does well to have the services, but should not feel they need to do it all themselves. Stick to the domain of the business.
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
mx
You need to find the answers to some questions:
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.
~~~~~~~
"You are not remembered for doing what is expected of you." - Atul Chitnis
Yes!
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.
Most linux distos use X11 for displaying GUIs, which has built in support for network transparency.
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 it (you can easily hack something together yourself if you want).
One other thing that X's native support for networked environments gives you is something like Citrix's seamless windows. You can run an app on your server, and it will display on your client just like applications run locally. In windows terminal services you get a desktop window with your app in it, or a full desktop session.
I've been through this too many times in the past. The simplist way to deal with this is:
1. Establish a budget that meets the paper-pusher's needs.
2. Off of that budget, outline the services, uptime, and response time you can deliver with the money you have. Spend a little time backing up what you say.
3.Publish that to the rest of your company and let them know this is the new performance standard you'll be delivering to the company. Make things that impact executives(like email, bandwidth speed, etc) the things you reduce services on the most and leave the core business needs alone. Sell it as a decision that you weren't willing to compromise the core services you provide to the business.
4. A suggested change if you don't already to it is to charge other departments for an outsourcer when employees create a problem from spyware, malware, or installing random crap on their machine. It's a good incentive for that employees manager to do something about them being an ass and it takes some of the pressure off you. We work on this stuff ourselves and use the outsourcing money to help us out with some tougher stuff elsewhere in our department.
5. Trust me on this one, once you put these rules in place other departments WILL spend their money on you.
STFU & GBTW
To be frank. Advice on how to save money for a small company is the topic at hand.
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.
Get rid of Windows wherever possible. Servers can run Linux or FreeBSD, MySQL, sendmail, etc. instead of Windows Server, SQL Server, and Exchange - that one simple move can save you thousands of dollars *per server*. Even desktops can be selectively replaced - for simple office applications, Evolution or Thunderbird work just as good, if not better, than Outlook, and since installing Firefox, I haven't touched IE in months.
-- Ed Carp, N7EKG erc@pobox.com PGP KeyID: 0x0BD32C9B What I'm up to: http://intuitives.mine.nu