3 Best Practices to Optimize Your IT Budget

Whether you work in a company, a public administration or a nonprofit, cutting IT costs is very likely one of your priorities. And for good reason: IT spending is expected to reach $5 trillion in 2024 worldwide, an increase of 6.8% compared to 2023, according to Gartner. So what are the possible ways to optimize your IT budget ?

In this article, 4 CIOs share their best advice for taking on the cost-optimization challenge!

Pool your efforts

Looking to optimize the IT budget allocated to rolling out new tools? Team up with other organizations that face the same challenges as you, and are looking for the same kind of solutions. That's what Lionel Babin, IT and Digital Director at the nonprofit Les Petits Frères des Pauvres, recommends:

"As a nonprofit, we have a far more limited budget than a company. Whenever possible, we therefore try to pool our efforts with other nonprofits. This allows us both to optimize our costs, but also to share lessons learned. For example, when setting up our HRIS, we were able to exchange with nonprofits that are members of a CIO club we belong to, which saved us time and pointed us straight to the right contacts."

Rationalize your application portfolio

Rationalizing your applications can be another effective way to optimize your IT budget, while accelerating your digital transformation. According to a study by Blissfully, a company of 100 to 1,000 employees has on average 137 SaaS applications. Yet 37% of this software isn't used by employees, which would represent a loss of $259 per workstation, estimates a study by software vendor 1E.

Why not clear out the software you're currently paying for? Which ones are obsolete, unused or underused?

The CIOs' perspective

As Jordan Delorme, Director of Information Systems and Innovation at the City of Clamart, explains, this rationalization is especially important in organizations with limited budgets, such as public administrations or nonprofits:

"We try to rationalize the components of our information systems as much as possible to reduce our costs and optimize the current setup. For example, we're in the process of optimizing our signature processes to streamline the signature workflow and reduce the number of signature tools we use to validate and sign documents."

For Sébastien Louyot, IT Services Director at Doctolib, rationalizing software is also essential to optimize teams' work processes, and to give them a more consistent work experience :

"Before March 2020, we used three different team messaging tools to work and communicate day to day, depending on the team. During the first lockdown, we switched 100% of the company onto a single chat tool. And it eventually became a go-to communication channel.

We also launched an intranet to improve our knowledge management, because our documents were scattered across around forty dedicated knowledge management tools, one per team or department. We centralized everything on a single portal, integrated with our collaboration suite, which made it easier to search for and share information internally, and thereby speed up the onboarding of new employees."

You get the picture: rationalizing the software you use is essential to cut your spending, eliminate unused, underused and/or redundant applications, and improve your teams' efficiency.

But how exactly do you go about it?

The rationalization steps

Here are 7 steps to follow to rationalize your applications (with systematic involvement of the business teams):

1. Identify the applications the business teams genuinely need
2. Make a detailed inventory of all the applications already in use
3. Analyze all these applications, determining in particular:
   • which features are used,
   • how often,
   • by which business teams,
   • for what purpose,
   • with what results,
   • and at what cost.
4. Evaluate each application based on its added value, its cost, its relevance to business needs, its level of redundancy, and any other criterion you find useful.
5. Based on the resulting score, determine which applications should be kept, eliminated or replaced.
6. After consulting management and the various business teams, put your rationalization plan in place
7. Make ongoing adjustments based on user feedback.

To make rationalization easier, why not try Talkspirit? Talkspirit is an all-in-one tool that brings together all the key features to streamline communication, collaboration and community engagement. To discover how Talkspirit can help you improve your organization's productivity, try it now! 👇

Automate business processes

Automating as many business processes as possible can also help you optimize your information system, optimize your IT budget and gain efficiency day to day. For example, if you create automatic messages to address your customers' main issues, your customer service team will have more time to devote to solving more complex problems.

As Olivier Montanes, IT & Business Improvement Director at Decouflé (a provider of technologies and services for the tobacco industry), explains, this process automation can also save the IT department time:

"One of the IT department's challenges is to free itself from time-consuming tasks that don't add much value, like the most basic support tasks, which could be handled by a chatbot. This automation will allow the IT department to focus on more important tasks, in particular fieldwork and dialogue with users."

Beyond this time saving, automation helps reduce the risk of human error, particularly on repetitive tasks such as backing up data, sending documents, following up with customers or tracking KPIs. You and your employees can thereby devote yourselves fully to more strategic projects such as rolling out new software, or overhauling the information system.

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In conclusion

By applying these three best practices, you'll be able to cut unnecessary spending and invest more strategically ! This article is an excerpt from our White Paper "Hybrid work: the IT department facing new challenges". Want to learn more about the challenges facing IT departments in the era of hybrid work? Read the full white paper available below. 👇

Access the White Paper

In it, you'll discover: the 3 major challenges facing IT departments in the era of hybrid work; concrete advice to accelerate your digital transformation, secure your workstations and improve the employee experience, along with the testimonials of 10 CIOs working in companies, public administrations and nonprofits.

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