Steve Turner

Maidenhead, Berkshire

general manager

Dear Sir,

The results of your recent CIO Jury poll closely mirror what is happening in the marketplace. IT departments across all industry sectors are under increased pressure to reduce expenditure whilst maintaining systems performance and deploying new technologies. This is due to the current economic climate and its effect on business planning as well as departments slowing down after investing a lot of time deploying SAP, ERP and other major systems over the past 2-3 years. It also proves that many IT operations are being run in a more efficient manner than previously achieved.

However, organisations need to be careful not to cut into IT budgets too deeply or in the wrong areas as this will be detrimental to the performance of the business, leading to false economies and increased costs in other parts of the operation. For example, training budgets are often seen as an easy target but failing to invest in user training will cause an increase in support costs.

The best performing IT operations, both financially and technically, are those that assess their IT spend carefully to ascertain the optimum level of spend for their business type. By optimising the cost of the IT operation, IT managers will be able to prove that they can cut costs and maximise return on investment, without it adversely affecting the day to day running of the business.