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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."
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
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.We just cut our IT department. I would not recomend this as it makes our development staff our IT department. Paying a programmer to do IT stuff is like paying your contractor (as in home building contractor) to clean your house. Not only is it going to cost you $200 per hour to have a clean house but it is really going to piss off your contractor.
No man is an island... But I wouldn't mind having a bigger moat.
Or you could do what I do, get a couple of overpaid, underworked management types fired. You'd be surprised how much overhead that can clear up. Usually doesn't take much more than a quick trip to their browser cache either.
Jaysyn
There is a war going on for your mind.
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