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
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
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
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
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.
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
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
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.