Emerging technologies and customer demands necessitate a proactive approach to IT operations. CIOs need to make effective moves to ingrain a culture of efficiency across the entire organization.
Adequate investment in technology will allow the CIOs to stay at par for capital costs and operations and maintenance (O&M). Here are three moves CIOs should make to achieve an efficient IT organization.
For efficient budget optimization, CIOs need to conduct a financial health check on their technology budget by conducting a benchmarking spend analysis on all categories associated with industry peers and leading technology companies. At the same time, CIOs need to recognize opportunities to minimize run costs and free up reserves to invest in reconstructive and new technology capabilities. Simultaneously, more unique areas of technology spending should be identified post last economic downturn. Since invariable cloud spending has leaped from low or even non-existent to high, CIOs need to ensure that cloud usage and costs should be elastic, expanding and contracting with the workload.
Also Read: CIOs Alert! Key Best Practices for Future Ready CIOs
CIOs need to take certain actions to optimize the cloud costs. Among them are- shutting down the testing environment when not in use, considering numerous types of storage for various classes of data, and getting responsive storage for transactional data. At the same time, they need to ensure higher-latency at lower cost for data that is not required immediately. Additionally, FinOps for the cloud can be utilized to scrutinize bills with hundreds of line items from the cloud providers to optimize spending while reaping significant benefits to prevent spend commitment errors.
Automating businesses is crucial the current environment, when the IT budget or the company is under pressure. It is vital to implement automation for the right reasons to analyze its effects on broader enterprise strategy beyond cost optimizations. Process automation cuts costs and liberates talent for higher-value, strategic activities, allowing the business to procure results from fewer people and address talent supply issues. As per a recent report by UiPath, “State of the RPA Developer 2022”, 53% of the enterprise reported an easy transition to RPA.
CIOs need to drive automation by utilizing robotic process automation (RPA) to make the enterprise achieve accuracy goals with reliable consistency.
Effective communication with the suppliers about the cost constraints will help the enterprises stay transparent, allowing the suppliers to make suggestions for ways to optimize the costs, whether outsourcing or insourcing.
One reason that pushes the higher costs is the over-licensed and oversubscribed software. An efficient way to tackle this issue is to optimize subscription fees on costly licenses by verifying that the user base uses a software product or even separately licensed and subscribed features. Additionally, identifying savings opportunities from open-source components instead of commercial software can minimize the costs. There is a rationalization of functionally redundant, archived, or retired products since software license agreements contain annual processes to reset maintenance costs when consumption patterns change. CIOs need to partner with experts to detect where an application is being used in real-time allowing them to recommend approaches to minimize expenses.
Also Read: Leveraging Cloud-Based Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) to Future-Proof Business models
CIOs also need to understand that restraining a project in its final stages to minimize costs will prolong technical debt for a short-term benefit. With the help of these effective moves, CIOs will be able to reduce the driving costs amid the ongoing uncertainties.
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Apoorva Kasam is a Global News Correspondent with OnDot Media. She has done her master’s in Bioinformatics and has 12+ months of experience in clinical and preclinical data management. She is a content-writing enthusiast, and this is her first stint writing articles on business technology. She has covered a wide array of crucial industry insights like Blockchain, strategic planning, data analytics, supply chain management, governance, compliance, and the latest industry trends. Her ideal and digestible writing style displays the current challenges, and relevant mitigation strategies businesses can look forward to. She has a keen interest in the latest enterprise trends like digital transformation, cloud, and enterprise resource planning. She looks for minute details, while her excellent language skills help her deliver a crisp-looking, niche-specific message through her articles. She is looking forward to exploring her writing styles and portraying her thoughts that can help enhance organizational effectiveness, business performance, and sustainability. Apart from writing, she enjoys spending time with her pet and reading oncology publications.
