IT Systems Integration or Systems Elimination?

Many companies are finding that, with the slowdown, they have too much custom-built or non-interoperable equipment from network servers to proprietary e-commerce software.

“… the marginal cost of maintaining redundant or overlapping harware and software can make a big difference to your bottom line.”

During a boom, when each are treated as a separate profit centre, the additional cost associated with a “spaghetti junction” network is less important than winning market share. In a recession, however, the marginal cost of maintaining redundant or overlapping harware and software can make a big difference to your bottom line: not only do you have the cost of running all the software on your own servers, but you also have to deal with security, outages, licensing and upgrades etc….

IT Consultancy Checklist

1. Objectivity: Make sure the IT Consultancy is independent and not “wedded” to any one hardware, software and/or service provider. You need an objective analysis of your current situation and future options, not an analysis influenced by one product’s capabilities or lack thereof. Make sure they understand how the Web integrates with the rest of your IT network. The last thing you want when you’re striving for efficiencies is a strategy that only addresses part of the problem.
2. Needs vs Wants: Brief them clearly on what drives your business and job functions. Ask them to focus their network audit on points of IT pain or opportunity, not just blue-sky “what if” scenarios.
3. Cost of Ownership: Make sure to consider hosted solutions, not just for your network but for your e-commerce, CRM and SFA applications. A hosted solution can reduce the time and cost of building and maintaining your own. Factor in all costs such as purchasing, licensing, training, upgrading, maintaining, and other running costs (power, insurance etc.) to compare hosted solutions with in-house ones on a like-for-like basis.
4. Integration vs Elimination: In some cases, you are best served by getting hardware and software to work better together. In other cases, you will be better off getting rid of marginal applications and consolidating their operations with a core application through an upgrade, a plug-in or middleware. Ask your potential IT consultant to demonstrate their ability to cross-compare the actual features and functions of your hardware/software against each other so that you can see exactly where you have duplicate capacity that can be eliminated.
5. People: Make sure your IT consultant really understands the human resources aspect of your operation. Keeping overlapping or redundant jobs are just as costly as keeping overlapping or redundant hardware/software. But employee reductions and consolidations need to be handled with extra care. Where you have to reduce headcount, don’t base cuts only on seniority or salary. Make sure you get all passwords beforehand and delete user accounts and access to intranets, extranets and shared network locations.

If you’re looking to get the best out of your hardware/software mix, talk to us about what you can expect from our IT consultancy services.

Disaster Recovery: When Suppliers Fail