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6 Keys for Creating an IT Budget for Recessionary Times |
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Page 4 of 6
No. 3: Prune Before You Need To
One thing that CIOs should pay more attention to is getting their costs in line when times are good. Very few CIOs have the discipline to do that.
Technology consultant John Sviokla likens the task to home maintenance. "You have to periodically clean out the attic," he says. "Good companies clean out the attic before they need to. Average companies do garage sales when they need the money. Bad companies never even do the garage sales."
Sviokla, who is the managing director of Innovation and Research at Chicago-based Diamond Management and Technology Consulting, says the best organizations regularly go through re-engineering exercises that help them see how they can take costs and people out of processes. These companies "imagine what they'd do in a recession and start doing it before the recession comes," Sviokla says. As a result, "they are able to keep investing at a more consistent level as the market moves around."
Sviokla says the companies that use IT strategically—including some big financial services companies—tend to be the ones who are always pushing to make their operations more efficient. The technologists at such companies "understand that business is cyclical and nothing grows to the sky."
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