IT operations can make or break a company's efficiency and, sometimes, its budget as well. Do it right, and the company will benefit. Do it wrong, and a business could pour significant money down a black hole. To make IT pay off better, a company needs more effective and intelligent practices. Not only can a business get more in return, but according to technology analyst firm Gartner, the right steps can cut IT operation and infrastructure costs by as much as 25 percent.
Here are seven practices that should improve both results and expenses.
Use cross-functional planning and communications. A classic problem for IT is when requests are tossed over a wall from the business units. Technologies implement what they think was requested and learn too late that they misinterpreted what users needed. Get all the relevant stakeholders into a single room and have them hash out what is needed. Continue the communications during the run of any project. That way, you've greatly increased the chance that people will learn what they need to know and that projects will be more successful at rollout.
Focus on big ROI and critical support. When you have limited resources, effective management suggests focusing on the company's biggest priorities. The same should hold true for IT. Part of innovation and creativity is learning what not to do. Focus the department on the projects that will have the greatest positive impact on revenue and profitability or that will support important strategic initiatives. Make every dollar and minute count.
Consider business process management. IT operations must run software systems. Technical personnel, however, won't know when changes to processes and the business rules that should inform software design actually happen. Business process management refers to systems that can abstract the process and rules part of the equation and put it into the hands of the users that must run the business. The result can save significant amounts of time and make IT systems more responsive to what the business needs.
Adapt to vanilla software. Companies are quick to say that they must do things in a particular manner. Generally, this is untrue. Businesses have more flexibility in how they steer operations. When a company pays to modify software that is critical to operations, it has introduced complexity and extra cost into ongoing maintenance. Look for a package that covers as large a percentage of operational needs and approaches as possible in its vanilla, or standard, configuration. Then examine how critical the remaining parts are.
Outsource to cloud services. Move non-core systems and services to cloud providers. Doing so will let you reduce operational expenses and administrative overhead while increasing system flexibility and ability to scale operations up or down to meet any changes in numbers of employees.
Virtualize and consolidate infrastructure. One part of a serious IT solution should be virtualization and consolidation. The former means that hardware and software is treated as flexible resources and used more efficiently. Instead of getting 5 or 10 percent solid use of servers and memory, you might get 40, 50, 60 percent - or even more. It becomes less hardware and software to buy, upgrade, or replace.
Adopt agile development. If you are doing any in-house development, have the staff look at adopting agile programming. A catchall for a number of new practices, developers work in teams to incrementally write, test, and roll out applications. Users have far more influence on design and function, and developers do not go into a corner, writing massive packages that could be significantly out of date by the time they are finally released.
IT operations is an area that can benefit from improved practices. Try some of these techniques to get more from your information technologies group.
Erik Sherman is an NCMM contributor and author whose work has appeared in such publications as The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times Magazine, Newsweek, the Financial Times, Chief Executive, Inc., and Fortune. He also blogs for CBS MoneyWatch. Sherman has extensive experience in corporate communications consulting and is the author or co-author of 10 books. Follow him on Twitter.