IT can help companies weather the crunch

It seems inevitable that IT budgets will face greater scrutiny as the global economy comes into question. After all, if increasing corporate costs and slowing or uncertain spending impacts revenue, then budget cuts will become a fact of life in the quest for profitability.

Proven cost-reducing IT measures (i.e. layoffs and investment cuts) will be no-doubt be adopted, while less traditional areas like SaaS, virtualisation and outsourcing should all flourish even more from this turn of events. Indeed in its recent “The State Of IT Services: 2008”, Forrester reported that while budgets have been slashed, demand for outsourced services remained high.

However IT is done, whether in-house, in the cloud or otherwise, it needs to be done with minimal cost. But while hardware and software costs have consistently fallen throughout ‘IT history’, operational costs like salaries have consistently increased. One benefit of business service management, is that it automates time-consuming processes like root cause analysis and it can project the potential effects of change on IT services. The attraction of such automation becomes particularly apparent when considering the looming squeeze on budgets as it presents a clear way of circumnavigating the predicament.

What is clear about this period of economic uncertainty is that businesses are demanding even more transparency over IT, both in-house and outsourced and IT downtime is likely to be scrutinised at a far higher level for far more firms than in the past. With IT downtime presenting potentially business-threatening cost, IT operations will increasingly find themselves mandated to take a more strategic approach to preventing downtime.