Cost Control: The Value Proposition

The 80:20 rule is a hard habit to break for many organisations. Those that do manage to free themselves out of their 'keeping the lights on' maintenance shackles and take that key ratio closer to 70:30 are the ones that are gaining a competitive advantage. Some have managed to do so spectacularly, saving millions of euros from their budget.

At the heart of delivering that transformation in IT spend and controlling your costs is a laser-like focus on process. Many companies state that due to the rapidly changing nature of their business, the recent downturn in the economy, and the pressure from their competition to become more cost-effective while still achieving the same or greater profits and output, they do not have time or resources to apply to process improvement. In fact, this is just the time when process rigour is critical.

By improving the processes around IT, the organisation can begin to practice more effective resource utilisation and improve the availability and reliability of mission critical IT services. Here the ITIL service management framework is the key that unlocks the door to reduced costs because it helps drive repeatable, automated processes. Adoption of these ITIL processes, of which incident management, problem management, change management and configuration management are the most familiar, has helped some organisations cut their operating costs by up to 10 percent, and the provision of support costs by 40 percent.

However, you can only maximise your adoption of ITIL if the service desk solution you are using is certified for ITIL compatibility. EasyVista recently completed the PinkVERIFY certification of ITIL v3 compatibility for service management with 11 processes verified as being ITIL-compatible. It is also important for your solution to be completely integrated and modular, and 100 percent available via the Web, delivered as a service. By adopting this approach, organisations can improve their service quality, limit and manage their asset deployment costs, and simplify implementation.

Having complete understanding and control of your assets is at the heart of effective service management. You need to know where your assets are and who has them, so your asset management solution should automatically discover and capture your assets, show their location and provide assignment information across the entire organisation. Automating these processes means IT organisations not only save time and money, but also retain accurate information for managing these assets throughout their lifecycle within the organisation. Good, accurate asset data underpins the increasingly tight integration between asset management and service management.

The need to rein in costs and improve manageability is also driving many organisations to consider how their software is delivered. Some are already using their service management solution via the Web as a service out of their operating expenditure rather than as an on-premise, capital purchase. For those organisations, EasyVista.com, delivered in a Software as a Service (SaaS) format can prove to be 50 per cent cheaper over a five year period based on 100 licences.

By adopting some of the measures referenced here, organisations can gain control of and then reduce their costs, improve their processing time and enhance their overall service provision.