With the advent of IT, every organization has been investing into the adding/upgrading and probably phasing out technology. However as organization are growing, the needs of their IT systems have been growing. The systems have gone through manifold changes with the changing business needs. Every application have gone through the hands of multiple people. Not only the application but also the IT infrastructure side of things also goes thru a drastic changes. With new set of hardware purchases to license purchases. At the end of the day, there is high degree of possibility that on a given day it is very difficult to estimate what our true cost towards technology should be.
In the current economic scenario, every organization is under pressure reduce the costs at each and every cost centre. IT and systems areas are the ones who would always face the highest pressure as they are mostly not the mainstream business for the organization. With that in mind I think it is necessary for every person working in this area to look at the following aspects
a. Work on getting the legacy pieces weeded out from the application(Basically Refactor) and reduce the cost to maintain/support application
b. Consolidate apps to make sure that the no two application is trying to provide the same feature. Also work on reducing redundant features
c. Phase out apps that are no longer being used or are being rarely used. For apps that are being used only some of the times or by a very limited set of people, there is a need to evaluate if it is required to continue having a separate app or can the features be consolidated some where else
d. Look at the complete license costs in the organization - Review in terms of re-use of surplus licenses, remove all together or strategically extend/buy new licenses
e. Analysis the utilization and distribution of infrastructure - Look at options to Consolidate/Phase out/or move to platforms that could reduce TCO.
The basic idea is to rationalize the cost towards building and maintaining the Applications, Infrastructure and Licenses used in the organization
