Think and make your department rich

As we start to think about what we want to achieve in FY 24 / 25, we're often challenged with how we're going to fit in everything we want to do into the budgets we have at our disposal. This can present a number of approaches to enabling this scenario:

• prioritising and cutting back essential services
• fighting for more funds to achieve what you want to do
• looking for clever ways to reduce costs and operate the same service with less costs

All of these are valid ways forward. As an experienced CIO or CTO, you'll no doubt have experienced something like this scenario in your careers (particularly if you've worked in public sector or not for profit organisations). Historically, this is one of the most common scenarios I've been involved in with organisations when offering advice from a consulting perspective. The engagement will have at least an element of this if not fully regarding this exact topic.

Let me talk through those 3 approaches to this scenario:

Prioritising and cutting back essential services

Depending on how essential the services are you're cutting, this can often be a short term gain for a much larger, future pain. Unless communicated correctly, it can severely impact on the reputation of IT, meaning users put in workarounds, install shadow IT or buy in other services, that become the norm and makes it much harder to then re-instil discipline. If you have to go down this route, then:

• • IT spend needs to be policed across the organisation and cost cutting needs to be across the board
  • Effectively communicate the service changes and be really clear on what IT services are offered what isn't offered
  • Be clear with execs and directors what the impact of this will be on the organisation and their customers / tenants / citizens / beneficiaries
  • Be confident (and can prove) that you're already running as lean and efficient as possible

Fighting for more funds to achieve what you want to do

This can be a risky strategy if you don't have all the facts. If you're going internally for additional funds then it's likely you're taking resources away from other departments or other services and you need to be sure that a) you're not going to have to ask for more half way through your project b) you're right about the benefits your increasing or the risks your reducing and who will see the benefit of these in the organisation. If you want to take this approach, then:

• • You need to be clear on how you're going to resource the projects and the gaps they leave behind in BAU
  • Be able to articulate to your beneficiaries in the organisation and what the ROI on the investment is to that person or department
  • Be able to articulate the consequences of not fixing the risks that exist to the person or department in the organisation

Looking for clever ways to reduce costs and operate the same service

This can be difficult, particularly if you've "salami sliced" over the last few years already and had your budget eroded over time. There might be ways of doing this though but might mean you need to:

• • Group together budgets from both IT and wider department spend on IT and services and looking for consolidation and overlaps
  • Look at capability and capacity to ensure you're getting the most from your team. i.e. you understand who is working on what and you're getting the most you can whilst ensuring good team comradery and its still a good place to work
  • Reduce your 3rd party spend on consultancies, 3rd parties and contractors - understand what services they run, deliver and whether there are overlaps in their responsibilities with those in the IT team
  • Understand which areas of your organisation are using what systems, where the overlaps are and what systems end users could live without - consolidating systems and reducing licensing costs, reducing hosting & cloud costs and reducing effort
  • Proactively manage contracts and make sure you're negotiating down contracts properly by leaving enough time and having a clear view on the value that 3rd party contracts offer to the organisation

We find, having a central knowledge base on where the relationships between technology, business use, budget, contracts, IT team capability and IT team capacity is a great resource for enabling the above conversations and information on which to drive decisions such as these. CoPerceptuo does just this, it holds all of this information, providing a set of insights on which to generate evidence to help articulate challenges to peers and executives in each of the scenarios outlined above.

If you'd like to understand more or speak to a CoPerceptuo representative further on this, please get in touch here.