Reduce IT Costs In Your Company: It has become a fundamental area for the development and growth of any business. Even if your company does not have its core business in IT, you have already observed the possibilities of the area within your business.
With IT, we increasingly have the opportunity to be faster, more creative and more efficient in products and services. Still, everything has its cost, and it is necessary to put that number on the tip of the pencil to continue growing.
Today we bring four tips on reducing IT costs in your company. Some tips you can implement in the short term and others in the long term; the important thing is to practice what can already be improved and structure the next steps.
Let’s learn how to use IT assertively and reduce operating costs. Enjoy and start writing down your insights from the reading to talk to your team.
Invest In Creating And Revising Existing Processes
Currently, the automation of processes and the use of RPA technologies have been on the minds of many IT managers, but is cost reduction genuine?
If you follow us, you know that we are fans, and we strongly advocate using these technologies, especially in the digital transformation journey. The point we want to draw attention to here is the correct use of automation technologies and tools.
Before automating anything in your company, you must build a good foundation for what will be automated. If your company has processes that could be better structured with automation, this will become increasingly evident, and the results could be disastrous.
As a starting point, we understand that it is essential to start by reviewing processes to reduce costs. Start by assessing your company’s current issues with your team.
- What problems is your company currently experiencing?
- What are the complaints from customers and employees?
- What errors are repeated?
- What can be improved?
- What are the tasks that the operator performs? And is the management involved with the operation?
These questions are a suggestion of where you can start your investigation. Identify those most critical issues and then create or consider improving the current process.
You Must Invest In Training Your Team And Strengthening The Culture
Many companies have reduced their efforts to train the team because they increasingly need people to perform their duties as early as possible. We understand this scenario, but training should not only happen when the employee is onboarded but should be continuous.
In addition, different capabilities and their needs need to be continually reviewed. These needs come from improving technical skills, internal processes and the company’s culture.
The company culture serves as a direction that the team follows in everyday situations, and sometimes there needs to be a process. The more the team gets to know and experience the culture, the more people feel empowered and safe to carry out their work autonomously.
This factor is fundamental to reducing costs, especially in the IT area. The more people know what they are doing, and there are support materials to consult in cases of doubt, the more operational failures are avoided.
Another benefit of investing in training is that people feel more valued and involved in helping to improve processes and projects. Thus, the team is willing to do a better job and stay with the company longer, thus reducing turnover costs.
As a starting point, we recommend the Corporate University as a digital platform to hire, teach and develop your team in a single location.
Align Long-Term Strategic Planning With Short-Term Experimental Projects
Some managers may feel trapped by their strategic plans and feel that they are missing out on market opportunities because they cannot be more flexible.
On the other hand, other managers may need to pay more attention to long-term planning and direct their actions to the present moment, often taking advantage of good opportunities and wasting some money in the process.
How can we unite these two worlds to reduce costs in the IT area? It’s time for you to create or revise your PETI. The IT Strategic Plan (PETI) is the intelligent planning of the technology department. It is based on concrete information and with the best market practices, creating competitive advantages for the company and aligning IT with its PE (Strategic Planning).
This plan is like an extensive timeline for resolving any gaps between the current state of IT and best practices. It will cover all initiatives that lead to business results and goals. This is when you should include projects like LGPD, equipment maintenance, Information Security initiatives, etc.
To execute this planning correctly, aiming at reducing costs in the IT area and at the same time taking advantage of market opportunities, managers can work with PoC (Proof of Concept) to validate their planning.
Let’s say you want to implement a new process or tool in the company to comply with the strategic plan. Your next step should be to structure a PoC to measure the results of this action. Likewise, you can also use this strategy to implement a market trend or an innovative product.
Also, consider using outsourcing strategies to outsource some of your IT functions. You don’t need to outsource everything at once; choose a part where you already understand it makes sense to outsource (such as a SOC, for example) and try applying the PoC concept with suppliers.