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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."
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
fewer users -> fewer issues -> lower costs.
if it weren't for those pesky users...
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
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).
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
What if my native country is India?
Where do I outsource to then????
Karnal
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.
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.
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.
http://tinyurl.com/47c8e/
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.
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
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.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
As you no doubt know, your expenses in a system - be it software or hardware - are not only the initial purchase, but also its upkeep, both in terms of ongoing direct costs (upgrade fees, purchase of parts or media), but in time. Every hour you spend working on something is an hour the employer had to pay for you to be maintaining something existing instead of making something better. Employers like to see progress. They're much more willing to pay when they see you're making progress.
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
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.
One thing we did when I was working at helpdesk was to work on our "own" projects in the company that supported undocument company needs. As a phone support guy, I had times where I wasn't really doing anything (I'll call that time "slashdot time"). During that time, I'd approach other business units (say, the mailroom because they tend to regard you with awe and humility) and see if any of their processes could be automated through some simple programmatic way. As it turned out, they were hand-parsing outgoing mail addresses for capitalization and formatting errors that were fairly uniform in their imported excel documents. By writing a macro for them to insert into their docs on import, I was able to parse and fix the file in 30 seconds where it had taken them 4 days of 3 people working on it all day. Someone calculated that the company would save something like 280,000 a year in overtime and allow those overworked people some time with their families. If your company recognized this as a gain they could capitalize into your department, you could afford to hire a couple more guys and take some of the work off the dudes who are overworked...or give them bonuses or raises (as happened in my case). A lot of the time, people don't even know they can be helped unless you ask them and by helping out other people, you end up helping yourself....PLUS the mailroom reacted with hyperspeed next time I needed a little something mailed out.