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6 Keys for Creating an IT Budget for Recessionary Times |
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Up until last year, Ron Frissora was an IT executive who had just about forgotten the meaning of the two words "cut back." Frissora is the chief information officer of M/I Homes, a publicly held company that builds thousands of homes a year "on spec"—hoping that someone who can afford them will come along and buy.
With the real estate market booming from 1998 to 2005, M/I Homes' bet paid off and the company grew 82% to $1.35 billion. But it's been a different story lately. M/I Homes' business has been contracting—home sales fell 24% last year and are expected to fall another 22% this year—and Frissora is scrambling to find ways to bring down costs. That's no easy matter given that some costs, such as software maintenance contracts, are fixed.
"You have to be creative," he says.
Not every CIO works in a boom-and-bust industry that is suffering through a downturn. But with the U.S. economy wavering, the sorts of decisions that Frissora is struggling with may soon be relevant to technology managers at all sorts of companies—public and private, big and small. With that in mind, CIOZone offers six best practices for how to look at the cost side of IT in a time of uncertainty.
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