What are some cost reduction strategies: Do we cut costs by reducing waste, leveraging technology, or something more? The challenge is always reducing operating costs, while not sacrificing quality, making the lives or employees more difficult, or increasing employee turnover. 

Leveraging technology to improve business processes and efficiency and encourage reducing waste as part of the organization culture.

Technology is changing very fast...its better to remove legacy and adopt to new age solutions  which will help reduce turnaround time at the same time speed to market can be increase. In cases you will win confidence of business by improving cycles. Off course another way is to drive a matrix driven organisation which can be measured on a continuous service improvement (CSI) . You must have heard about AIOPS/operational analytics ...its a one step forward to look for cashcows in system and remove those bubbles. 

We have deployed ServiceNow with superior results.  The self-service has been exceptional and allowed us to repourpose about 30% of level-one staff.  Additionally, we have moved to Dell's pre-imaging service for about $30/computer.  Our level-two staff was spending about 2.5 hours per PC on prep time (~$92.5/PC), which we have happily moved to other line items.