Friday, November 13, 2009

How to utilize IT budgets effectively

AS IT manager your budgets are limited, your resources are overloaded with lots of business requirements. The question that always bothers you, how do I priortize user requirements ? How much budget you should allocate for particular fiscal year or fiscal quarter ?

Develop the long term plan

Even though your budget might not allow to complete the entire project, you should lay down detailed long term IT plan. Divide this long term plan into achievable short term objectives.

Gain the confidence of executives and sponsors

Convince the executives on how effective IT strategy can help the bottom-line. Focus on how IT can help employees more productive, reduce the overall cost.

Choose right kind of softwares

Software licensing, support costs constitute majority of IT budgets. Best advertised softwares may not be always better for your company. There are few guidelines that can help you choose the right softwares

  • Total Cost of ownership - Evaluate the cost of the software not only based on initial licensing cost, but also think about implementation , support costs. These days software vendors keep highly discounted softwares but in long run it may not be cost effective.
  • Scalability: See if the software is scalable.
  • Long-term vs Short-term requirement: If the software is required only for short-term then look for free and open-source type of softwares
  • Business Needs - See if the softwares you choose meets requirements for one business user or many of them.

Reassess the annual software maintenance costs

Many software vendors offer heavy discounts while selling the software but they charge the maintenance costs at full price. At times those software may not be used extensively in the organization or there might be free open source software available in the market. Re-assessing the needs of such software might help reduce these costs.