IT Cost Containment

Over the past months, driven by the economic crisis, cost containment and reduction has become a major topic. Also the CIO business expectations for 2009 indicate that cost containment is on the rise. Improving business processes has been the #1 priority since 2006, but for 2009, rank 2 and 3 are occupied by cost reduction and workforce effectiveness.

This is also reflected in our client interactions, where cost reduction measures have become a frequent discussion topic. We therefore developed an approach to quickly identify savings potentials on the basis of comparing a reduced set of key metrics of a client organization with peer group data. A significant deviation will not reveal causal relations and automatically define the right measures to address the issue, but it provides an indicator which areas should be subject to a more detailed analysis and maybe a sub-sequent full-blown cost reduction program.

The following pic provides an overview of the complete approach:

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