Reducing costs with IT

With License management, HW  consolidation and energy saving  IT.

Link to the management summary of the EMA- IT Management research

www.computerworld.com/pdfs/EMA-BDNA-Insight.pdf

IT Expenditures in Belgium

Important information in order to know whether your company’s IT expenditures are in line with  those of your industry  or not, can be found at  the site :

www.pac-online.com

Information classified following : Manufacturing, Banking, Insurance, Public, Utilities,Telecom, Retail, Services and Transport.

Breakdown per industry: Internal Staff, Hardware, HW maintenance, System Infrastructure Software and Tools,Application SW, Project services, Outsourcing  (and Other ).

The information costs Euro 800 and can be obtained by addressing a mail to v.gelineau@pac-online.com

CFO: Responsibilities in the future

Source : read in Financial Media - www.fm.be
A survey about future responsibilites of a CFO showed following working areas:

• Quality of financial data
• deliver CEO decision support
• more comprehensive reporting ( information) towards non-financial departments( production,sales logistics, postsales operatons )
• improve collaboration between Finance and others
• Focus on value creation
• improve efficiency and quality at transactional level by means of automatisation and possibly outsourcing and/or shared services
• integration of stand-alone systemen with efficient reporting in mind
• more responsiblities via centralisation and financial risk management
• more attention to competency- and peoplemanagement
• development of sufficient flexibility towards new structures and tasks
• further selfdevelopment in the area of social skills and leadership

The items in bold touch the ICT area.

In order to bring them to a value creating entity, Gartner’s growmodel – re here the chapter below – can be recommended.

Competitive Advantage: Creating and Sustaining Superior Performance

This might look like an old book to you, but I found it highly relevant.

And the Financial times said:

The most influential management book of the past quarter century… A veritable goldmine of analytical concepts and tools to help companies get a much clearer grasp of how they can create and sustain competitive advantage.

There’s a great summary of the book here.

Creating value with ICT

Many organizations utilize process maturity models (e.g., CMM, Gartner) to assess their current level of IT process maturity, identify a desired state and build a gap analysis highlighting the areas of people, process and technology to invest in for better alignment with the overall business. Even more detailed models have recently been created to evaluate specific processes, such as IT Asset Management and other key domains. IT organizations must seriously consider all aspects of process maturity.

Check out the Gartner model. On what level are you and where would you like to be?

You’ll see inventory comes in at level 1. That’s where Optimassets comes in.

Source: aperture.com

Welcome to the Optimassets Company site

The Optimassets company helps you start, develop and maintain your asset management.

Asset Management builds and keeps accurate records of your IT tools.

Physical checks are a necessary first step.

Then you determine your strategy and develop your process.

Optimizing your assets will realize savings in your Total Cost of Ownership. These savings will come from price negotiations, maintenance and license trimming as well as from keeping correct spare inventory level as well.

Start here.